New staff members never know what to make of it. In fact, many who have been with the magazine for several years still aren't quite sure what to make of Rich, but at least now they know what he's talking about when he leaves for the day.

The "yacht" Rich refers to is really a ferry run by the city of New York that transports Staten Islanders to and from one of the city's five boroughs. Docking in Battery Park City in Manhattan's downtown area, the ferry provides one of the two easternmost entry points to the island. The other is via the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in Brooklyn.

Rich, who used to be in the Navy, says he really enjoyed reading Associate Editor Michael Valenti's cover story on double-hulled tankers ("Double Wrapped"). Of course, the major resemblance between any twin-hulled tanker described by Valenti and the ferries Rich rides home may not go beyond the fact that they're both vessels. But anyone who travels to work by "yacht" surely can appreciate the safety features engineered into double-hulled tankers.

As Valenti points out, a double-hulled tanker is a ship equipped with a hull within a hull; "a double skin of steel separated by a distance of 2 to 3.5 meters."

Double-hulled vessels are effective, and the extra 10 percent it costs to build them is worth the safety this type of construction provides.

When a barge rammed the tanker Guardian in October 1997, the collision ripped a 400-square-foot gash in the side of the tanker. But the second, undamaged inner hull safely contained the oil cargo. Since 1998, Conoco Inc., the Houston-based company that owns the Guardian, has operated a fleet made up exclusively of double-hulled tankers.

Among the provisions of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990—passed following the wreck of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in 1989, when 11.2 million gallons of crude oil were spilled into the sea—is the mandate that all petroleum-carrying tankers operating in U.S. ports by the year 2015 possess double hulls to prevent spills from punctures.

Back in the early 1980s, while a reporter for the Connecticut newspaper The Hartford Courant, I covered the sinking of an oil barge on Long Island Sound. It was then that I witnessed firsthand the horrendous damage a polluting oil spill can have on sea life and the local environment.

Aboard a Coast Guard cutter, marine specialists and I traveled early one cold morning from New London, Conn., through the often treacherous Race—a stretch of currents where Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound meet to create an unyielding pattern of crisscrossing waves—in search of the slowly sinking barge.

As Coast Guard personnel tried to contain the spill from spreading, dead fish began to surface on the water. And as we toured the coastal beaches of Block Island to determine the impact of the spill, we spotted more casualties: hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead fish washed ashore, suffocated by the oil. As I read Valenti's article, these images immediately came to mind.

In reading the article, I know you will join me in celebrating the engineering that went into developing these double hulls, an achievement that will undoubtedly save millions of dollars, as well as help preserve our environment.

Email your comments or questions to: falcionij@asme.org

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