96
Opinion of the Court
Puget Sound. Most is extracted from Alaska's North Slope reserve and is shipped to Washington on United States flag vessels. Foreign-flag vessels arriving from nations such as Venezuela and Indonesia also call at Washington's oil installations.
The bulk of oil transported on water is found in tankers, vessels which consist of a group of tanks contained in a shipshaped hull, propelled by an isolated machinery plant at the stern. The Court described the increase in size and numbers of these ships close to three decades ago in Askew v. American Waterways Operators, Inc., 411 U. S. 325, 335 (1973), noting that the average vessel size increased from 16,000 tons during World War II to 76,000 tons in 1966. (The term "tons" refers to "deadweight tons," a way of measuring the cargo-carrying capacity of the vessels.) Between 1955 and 1968, the world tanker fleet grew from 2,500 vessels to 4,300. Ibid. By December 1973, 366 tankers in the world tanker fleet were in excess of 175,000 tons, see 1 M. Tusiani, The Petroleum Shipping Industry 79 (1996), and by 1998 the number of vessels considered "tankers" in the merchant fleets of the world numbered 6,739, see U. S. Dept. of Transp., Maritime Administration, Merchant Fleets of the World 1 (Oct. 1998).
The size of these vessels, the frequency of tanker operations, and the vast amount of oil transported by vessels with but one or two layers of metal between the cargo and the water present serious risks. Washington's waters have been subjected to oil spills and further threatened by near misses. In December 1984, for example, the tanker ARCO Anchorage grounded in Port Angeles Harbor and spilled 239,000 gallons of Alaskan crude oil. The most notorious oil spill in recent times was in Prince William Sound, Alaska, where the grounding of the Exxon Valdez released more than 11 million gallons of crude oil and, like the Torrey Canyon spill before it, caused public officials intense concern over the threat of a spill.
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