Cement Pilings News

Offshore exploration is a history of man v. Prospecting for oil is a dynamic art. From a lake in Ohio, to piers off the California coast in the early 1900s, to the salt marshes of Louisiana in the 1930s, to the first “out-of-sight- of-land” tower in 1947 in the Gulf of Mexico, the modern offshore petroleum industry has inched its way over the last roughly 75 years from 100 ft. of water ever farther into the briny deep, where the biggest platform today, Shell’s Perdido spar, sits in 8,000 ft. of water. As a planet, we have two unquenchable thirsts – for water and for oil.

Response teams continue to clean up an oil spill around and underneath Pier 91 at Smith Cove in Elliott Bay today. The main area of impact of the oil appears to be contained underneath Pier 91 of the Port of Seattle. The cleanup is being coordinated with the Port of Seattle. The assessment and labor intensive cleanup of the impacted shoreline is to continue into Friday and possibly the weekend. Cleanup crews are aggressively working to remove all the spilled oil on the deck and hull of the Songa Hua, and have recovered approximately one gallon of the spilled intermediate fuel oil from Elliott Bay, while oil stains and some recoverable oil are visible on the cement pilings underneath pier 91 and along the rocky "rip-rap" on the shore.