The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation and the U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday responded to an Adak Island diesel fuel spill that could be as much as 143,000 gallons.

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The No. 2 diesel spilled from an underground storage tank, said DEC on-site coordinator Gary Folley. It happened as a tanker was offloading fuel Monday afternoon and may have occurred because the tank overflowed, he said.

Officials believe most of the fuel spilled on land around the tank farm. Visual estimates from the owners of the storage tank, Adak Petroleum, were that a small fraction -- about 1,000 gallons -- made it to the nearby small boat harbor.

Adak Petroleum is a subsidiary of Aleut Enterprises.

As soon as workers knew about the spill, they set up booms to try to contain it from leaking into nearby water sources, Folley said. They first noticed something was wrong when a diesel smell was detected in Sweeper Cove, he said.

The DEC said the fuel likely made it to the harbor and cove by escaping into a drainage system that collects water from around the tank farm and discharges it to a salmon creek that drains out to the cove.

By Tuesday, the spill appeared to have been stopped, the DEC report said. While cleanup began on the drainage system, no cleanup was undertaken in the cove because of "safety concerns associated with conducting night operations," the DEC report said.

Diesel fuel is a light refined petroleum. No oiled wildlife has been observed, the DEC report said, but a sheen has been seen on the south side of the boat harbor and at the mouth of another nearby creek.

The DEC, Coast Guard and a private cleanup company, Alaska Chadux, went to Adak with more oil response cleanup equipment on Tuesday.

The island, on the Aleutian Chain 1,300 miles southwest of Anchorage, is home to 180 people.

It was not clear what the fuel was being off-loaded for but the Aleut Enterprises Web site says it provides fuel at Adak for commercial fishing, marine cargo, private tourism and other boats and ships traveling through the North Pacific.

"Adak Petroleum is conducting a comprehensive investigation to identify and correct all procedural, equipment failure and inappropriate third-party action that may have caused or contributed to the discharge," according to an Adak Petroleum press release.

Adak's waters are home to migratory birds and some 300 sea otters, wildlife officials say.

Steve Delehanty, manager for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, said the initial on-site reports from Sweeper Cove were that not many migratory birds, such as sea ducks, were around Tuesday. But he said refuge managers were just beginning to understand the scale and scope of the problem.

Sweeper Cove, along with all the waters around the island, is considered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be "critical habitat" for the southwestern sea otter, an animal susceptible to the dangers of an oil spill and protected under the Endangered Species Act. There are an estimated 40,000 sea otters left in Southwest Alaska.

The critical habitat designation for the sea otters applies from the end of the Aleutian Islands to lower Cook Inlet and includes the Kodiak Archipelago.

Sweeper Cove has just a couple of sea otters, according to U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist Verena Gill. Surveys from the past decade have counted from zero to two sea otters in the cove, she said.

Find Megan Holland online at adn.com/contact/mholland or call 257-4343.

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