An unmanned barge remained adrift in waters north of Alaska's Arctic Slope on Monday, carrying roughly 950 gallons of fuel and floating farther from shore, thwarting some recovery options, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Since last week, the Coast Guard has been working with the Canadian Coast Guard and the barge's owner to monitor the 134-foot vessel. During a Beaufort Sea storm Oct. 21, the barge broke from cables that attached it to a Canadian tow boat. The tow boat continued to travel east while the barge floated westward and crossed into U.S. waters.
By Monday, the barge was about 110 miles southeast of Point Barrow. It was traveling northwest at between 1 and 2 mph, about 30 miles from shore, said Cmdr. Shawn Decker, chief of response for the Coast Guard's Anchorage sector.
Decker said the U.S. and Canadian coast guards have conducted daily flyovers to record the barge's location. In the next two days, they hope to drop a GPS beacon onto the barge from a helicopter. The beacon will transmit hourly updates on its coordinates, he said.
The effort to recover the barge will largely depend on the seasonal expansion of sea ice as it creeps toward the boat from the north and the south, Decker said.
"The North Slope is starting to freeze from the shoreline out, and the Arctic ice pack is moving every day south," he said.
All vessels servicing the Prudhoe Bay oil fields that could have helped retrieve the barge have been put away for winter, Decker said. He said there are "potential recovery options" out of Barrow, but the barge would have to move closer to shore.
The barge could also get iced in -- frozen in the Beaufort Sea until the ice breaks up in June. In that case, Decker said, the coast guards would make attempts to remove the fuel onboard, which is stored in internal tanks.
Decker said he would be deploying to Barrow on Tuesday to serve as the incident manager on the recovery effort.
The barge is owned by Canadian marine operator and barging company Northern Transportation Corp. Ltd.