SANDY POINT — When a boat caught fire last Friday morning, neighbors along Sucia Drive pulled out their phones, took photos and videos, spoke with police and considered evacuations.
Unintentional profanities and the sounds of explosions lingered in the air as massive flames overtook the vessel, a 60-foot pleasure craft privately owned by a local couple.
“The flames were all the way up to the third story,” said Sara Holliday, a neighbor across the street from where the boat was moored. “We heard a really loud explosion initially, and that’s when we got out of bed to see what happened. I started filming right away.”
Holliday heard the first explosion just before midnight. Over the course of the next hour and a half, she heard several more while Whatcom County firefighters worked to extinguish the flames. The cause of the fire is under investigation.
After the fire was extinguished, the boat continued to take on water and began to sink. By the time the Washington Department of Ecology arrived on the scene later that morning, it was completely below the surface.
Though the fire was out, the boat still posed a threat of another kind: an oily sheen was visible on the surface of the water throughout the inlet.
“It was actively discharging red dye diesel into the water,” said Jasmin Adams, acting communications manager for the department. “At the time, [the department] estimated about 25 to 50 gallons already discharged.”
Ecology won’t be able to say for sure how many gallons actually spilled into the inlet, located on the north end of Lummi Bay, until the vessel is hauled out of the water and a thorough investigation can take place.
Ecology is still working to contain the spill, but cleanup crews were able to recover about 15 to 20 gallons, Adams said.
A containment boom is currently draped around the vessel, raised earlier this week, to keep more oil from spreading into the Lummi Bay. A boom is a temporary barrier that floats on the surface of the water, trapping oil spills in small zones to make cleanup easier.
Local and state agencies, including the Department of Ecology and the U.S. Coast Guard, responded to the fire and the subsequent spill. Oil-spill crews from the Phillips 66 refinery, located just a few miles north of the Sandy Point Marina, also responded, according to emails from Brittany Flittner, who is a project specialist in the Spill Prevention, Preparedness, and Response team at Ecology. The emails were provided to CDN by a third party.
NRC, an international oil spill management company, and Crux Diving, a specialty diving company, were hired to assess and clean up the site, according to Flittner’s emails.
The spill was small, but still a significant environmental concern because of where it happened.
“It’s really close to the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve,” explained Eleanor Hines, lead scientist and North Sound baykeeper at RE Sources, a local environmental nonprofit. “The reserve was … designated because of its unique ecological functions and species that are super important.”
The aquatic reserve is a 3,000-acre zone protected and managed by the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR). So far, no environmental impacts have been reported to Ecology, but neighbors need to be vigilant, Hines said.
“We do definitely have concerns over seabirds, especially, because they are pretty vulnerable to getting covered in oil,” Hines said.
Fish, too, can be put at risk by an oil spill.
“Petroleum products, even at extremely low levels, can have sublethal and lethal impacts to juvenile salmon and juvenile forage fish,” Hines said. Studies “show that while it doesn’t always straight up kill them right away, it did have impacts that just made it harder throughout the remainder of that organism’s life to survive and thrive.”
The U.S. Coast Guard and NRC are conducting additional surveys and assessments to watch for oil and impacts to the shoreline.
“Because it was such a quick response, I think a lot of the risk was really minimized,” Hines said. “We are really thankful to Phillips 66. They were able to respond really quickly to the scene.”
This is not the first time a boat has gone down near the Sandy Point Marina. Over the past decade, several abandoned and derelict vessels have sunk near Lummi Bay. In 2019, a similar boat began sinking, and over the span of several days, leaked gallons of oil into the bay.
This boat, though, was different: not abandoned, not derelict and still very much in use.
“This wasn’t just a derelict vessel,” Adams said. “It was someone’s private boat that ended up catching fire.”
The owners, who requested to remain anonymous, said they have been restoring the boat in preparation for family vacations and adventures around the San Juan Islands this summer, and were out of town when the fire happened.
“To wake up to the shock of what had happened was beyond surreal for us,” the owners told CDN. “About all we can say is how thankful we are that nobody was hurt.”
The cause of the fire has not yet been determined, but Holliday says she’s seen crews studying the site for the last couple of days.
