EXXON WANTS NOTORIOUS TANKER BACK ON DUTY IN ALASKA WATERS

By DAVID WHITNEY
Daily News reporter

WASHINGTON- Seven years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground and created the worst oil spill in U.S. history, Exxon Corp. is fighting to put the tainted tanker back to work in Alaska waters from which it has been banned by Congress.

Exxon's shipping subsidiary, SeaRiver Maritime, contends in lawsuits filed last month in Houston and Washington, D.C., that a 1990 ban is unconstitutional and amounts to a ''taking'' of a $125 million vessel built specifically for the Alaska trade.

The 20-year-old tanker, renamed the Mediterranean after its repair, has been operating in the Mediterranean Sea carrying oil from Egypt to other nearby countries.

But Pete Rupp, a SeaRiver vice president, said in a telephone interview Thursday that the vessel can't earn much money in that business because the Jones Act requires it to be operated by American crews whose higher wages make it uncompetitive.

Two years ago, SeaRiver applied for a federal operating subsidy, perhaps as much as $1 million a year, to make the tanker more competitive. Rupp said that subsidy has not been approved and that SeaRiver decided to go to court to restore the vessel's sailing rights in Alaska after corporate lawyers concluded the 1990 ban was unconstitutional.

''She's one of the most modern, state-of-the-art tankers,'' Rupp said. ''She and her sister ship, the Long Beach that's still in the Alaska trade, are the two newest tankers built in the United States.''

The 987-foot tanker, capable of carrying 62 million gallons of crude, dumped 11 million gallons of her load into Prince William Sound after running up on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989. Exxon spent more than $3 billion to scrub oil off hundreds of miles of rocky shoreline and paid more than $1 billion more to settle civil and criminal cases arising from the spill, with more bills pending.

To many Alaskans, the tanker remains an unwelcome symbol of the environmental disaster.

''We cannot forget and won't ever forgive,'' said Sylvia Ward of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. ''It would be an outrageous insult to the people and marine life of Prince William Sound to ever allow that tanker back to the scene of the crime.''

Congress agreed when it passed the 1990 Oil Pollution Act.

The bill cleared Congress just as massive repairs to the Exxon Valdez, then renamed, were being completed in California. To prevent the ship from going back into service while a second year of cleanup was coming to an end, Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens tacked on a provision banning entry by any ship that had spilled more than 1 million gallons ''after March 22,1989.''

Although not named, that provision applied only to the Mediterranean. SeaRiver contends the provision is unconstitutional because it was applied retroactively.

The Houston lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, seeks to stop the federal government from enforcing the ban. The second, filed in the U.S. Court of Claims in Washington, seeks compensation with interest for the loss of the ship's use.

SeaRiver's goal in the dual lawsuits, however, is get the tanker back in the Alaska trade.

''That's where we'd like to bring her,'' Rupp said in the interview from his Houston office.

Mitch Rose, Stevens' press aide, said Exxon approached the Republican lawmaker this year about lifting the ban. The senator refused.

''The memories are still too strong to allow the vessel to return to Alaska waters,'' Rose quoted the traveling senator as saying Thursday.

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