Scramble To Contain Fuel Spill In North Sea Harbor

A capsized boat that leaked diesel fuel into North Sea Harbor on Friday morning, May 13, sent state and local environmental staff scrambling to contain the spreading sheen of fuel on the harbor’s surface.

The stench of diesel was thick in the area around the mouth of Alewife Creek, where a boat tied to a bulkhead on the creek’s eastern shore tipped over, spilling an unknown amount of its fuel into the creek early on Friday morning.

“There’s a sheen of diesel from the shellfish hatchery all the way up into the creek,” Peter Topping, the Peconic Baykeeper, said on Friday morning. “Fortunately, we’re still at the end of the incoming tide, and we have an east wind, so it seems contained in the creek for now. What concerns me is when the tide switches and getting this all contained by then, so it doesn’t end up out in the harbor.”

Southampton Town Trustee Bill Pell said that he received a call from a resident of the creek at about 7:30 on Friday morning.

“It’s an old trawler, about 35 feet, it rolled over at the dock,” Pell said. “There were four or five boats tied up to an illegal dock. We’ve sent the bay constables there several times to tell him to clean it up, because we’d get a lot of complaints.”

Pell said he called the managers of the Conscience Point Shellfish hatchery to make sure that their oysters were not suspended near the surface — oil-based fuels float on the surface of water and do not pose an immediate threat to shellfish on the bay bottom — and called Trustees staff to bring spill containment booms. The booms, inflatable floating barriers, keep floating oil and fuel from spreading.

Pell said that he thought the boat that caused the problem had been moved recently and that the way it was tied to the dock caused it to roll over when the tide dropped, leading to the fuel spill.

Trustee President Scott Horowitz said that town waterways maintenance staff and the State Department of Environmental Conservation Spill Response team had contained the fuel and removed as much of it as possible from the water, using absorbent pads.

North Sea Harbor is home to the town-owned Conscience Point Marina, the shellfish hatchery and is the conduit for one of the largest “runs” of migrating alewives, an anadromous species of herring, tens of thousands of which swim up the creek, which connects to Big Fresh Pond, to spawn each spring.

Horowitz said that the town attorney’s office has been informed of the circumstances and that the owner of the boat could be cited for violations.

“It’s not a good scenario,” he said. “I think more will come out of this as we move forward.”