The California State Lands Commission is one of the agencies that is helping to sponsoring our trip. The Commission’s interest in tsunamis is from its responsibilities for the safety of tankers off- and on-loading crude oil and processed petroleum products in the state and establishing safety regulations for marine oil terminals. They funded a project I worked on a few years ago looking at the tsunami hazard associated with marine oil terminal sites within San Francisco Bay. So today we visit the tank farm and fuel dock in Pago Pago harbor. The dock and tank farm are on government land and operated by BP. Tankers typically arrive twice a month to supply American Samoa with gasoline, diesel, fuel oil. Fortunately no tanker was in the area on September 29. The tank farm and fuel dock are located on the western side of the bay. Pago Pago harbor was one of the most heavily hit areas in American Samoa. Most of the water heights on the southern side of the island were in the 6 to 12 foot range. The harbor is shaped like a twisted triangle with a one mile wide mouth narrowing to less than a quarter mile at its head. This shape concentrated the flow and the International Survey Teams measured water heights of over 20 feet at the head of the bay. The Pago Pago tide gauge is located about 400 m west of the fuel dock and recorded peak water heights of about 7.2 feet above the mean tide level, with a maximum peak to trough oscillation of 12 feet. Observers at the fuel dock noted that the water came nearly to the dock platform but saw no water on the platform. The tank farm, on higher ground inland of the highway, also remained dry. We spoke with the safety officer and the managing engineer of the site who were concerned about what might have happened had a tanker been at the site. Their main worries were the currents, estimated between 12 and 16 knots, that might have been strong enough to pull the tanker away from the moorings if it had been at the dock. Two tuna boats double docked on the opposite side of the bay at the Startkist tuna cannery were reportedly broken loose of their moorings (we’re still following up on this story to get more details). The BP staff were concerned that the mooring bollards, the metal posts for connecting the mooring lines from the ships to the dock, would not have been strong enough to resist the flow. They thought that the mooring lines would have held but the two 50 ton and six 25 ton bollards might not have been sufficient to restrain the tanker. They are proposing replacing two of the smaller bollards with 50 tons. There were no problems at the tank farm. The facility is new – the oldest tank in the tank farm was built in 1989 and the newest in 2002 and all are built to resist seismic zone 4 shaking.

Next on the agenda was debris disposal. The first day we were in American Samoa, we heard an estimate of about 65,000 cubic yards of tsunami-generated debris. The debris is hand sorted on site into scrap metal and non-scrap, potentially hazardous materials like batteries and fuel drums removed, and the remainder sent to the Futiga landfill. Landfills are particularly problematic in tropical islands with limited space and high rainfall. The Futiga landfill is already nearing capacity – before the tsunami it was estimated to be filled in two years. It’s rather startling to see this large landfill tucked in the verdant valley adjacent to farms and homes. At the moment the tsunami debris are being piled on the edge of the landfill while the normal refuse is being incorporated into the main fill. There is a currently a debate going on as to how to process it – whether to do some compacting processing such as incineration before putting it into the landfill so in the interim, it’s all sitting on the sidelines.