Thousands of gallons of oil gushed from a broken freighter and fouled Unalaska Island beaches Thursday as hope dwindled for six of its crew who were lost the night before in the crash of a Coast Guard rescue helicopter.

Daylight brought calmer seas to the rugged, rocky west shore of Unalaska, but revealed an ugly sight: A thick sheen of oil spreading hundreds of yards from the two halves of the vessel in all directions.

Responders flying over the scene Thursday saw what they thought looked like two dead cormorants.

Rear Adm. Jim Olson, the Coast Guard commander in Alaska, said at a late-night press conference that the agency believes the freighter was adrift for about 13 hours before its crew notified the Coast Guard they were in trouble. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the freighter's grounding.

Asked whether he thought the vessel should have contacted the Coast Guard sooner, Olson said investigators will determine that. "We always ask that people call as soon as they can," he said. But it was severe winter squall conditions that limited the Coast Guard's ability to assist the freighter, he said.

Olson made a daylong round-trip journey from Anchorage to Unalaska Thursday for a firsthand look. On his return, he dropped off in Kodiak the four-man crew of the helicopter that crashed.

"They're doing well," Olson said. "Quite honestly, they're glad to be alive, but they also are very upset that they were in an accident and six people lost their lives."

It was still unclear what caused the helicopter to go down. It went into the water near the freighter. The Coast Guard will investigate, but that could be a lengthy process.

The Coast Guard and other responding agencies spent the day searching for the freighter's six missing crew members and trying to assess the spill from the air. They found no sign of the crew members, five Indians and one Filipino.

A mate on one of the tugboats during the rescue efforts Wednesday night described brutal winter winds gusting up to 60 mph and seas as high as 30 feet. "We stood by the whole time," said Steve Devitt, who crewed on the tug James Dunlap.

"We just got hammered out there."

A spokesman for the freighter's owner, IMC Transworld, said company agents had contacted the families of the missing men.

"Of course they are very sad and want to know what is going on," said IMC crew manager Loh C.W. Weng. "They are praying very hard that everyone is OK. We are praying very hard for them."

No attempts were made Thursday to contain the widening oil slick, and state environmental officials said they couldn't guess how much of the nearly 500,000 gallons of heavy bunker oil aboard had spilled. It is, however, almost certainly the largest marine spill in Alaska since the 11 million-gallon Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989.

The fuel, an unusually heavy substance called "bunker C," is a dense, viscous oil used to power the ship. State environmental officials said it is hard to contain and clean up once it hits the water. It sinks through the water column and can coat the sea floor. In a smaller spill of the same fuel off Unalaska several years ago, divers went down to scoop the mucky stuff off the bottom.

"This is a very serious spill," Kurt Fredriksson, acting commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, said at an afternoon press conference. "It's going to be very difficult to deal with. It's difficult oil ... and a sensitive shoreline."

Unalaska is in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

Fredriksson said that oil has coated some of the shoreline. No one has gotten close enough to determine conclusively whether any wildlife has been injured by the oil yet.

Fredriksson and Coast Guard officials said they haven't yet been able to learn whether any oil is still safely contained in the ship or estimate how much might have been lost.

Chief Petty Officer Roger Wetherell, a Coast Guard spokesman, said someone would have to go onto the freighter to do that. "We need to determine whether it's safe enough, and we haven't done that yet," he said.

Fredriksson said the good weather that visited the spill site Thursday is not expected to last long. Winter in the Bering Sea is more likely to resemble the blustery storm that tore the freighter apart Wednesday night. Spill response agencies will have to consider the safety of workers trying to react to a dangerous situation in a dangerous place on a daily basis, he and Wetherell said.

"We will underline with a dark red pen human safety," Fredriksson said.

"There's no limitation on what we're going to put on this in terms of making equipment and personnel available," he said.

But the spill is in a remote area accessible only by boat and helicopter. No roads lead even close to the tall cliffs that look out on what's left of the Selendang Ayu.

"This is a very difficult, Aleutian Islands environment," he said. "The future does not look bright."

One person intimately familiar with the area is Greg Hawthorne, who operates a summer fishing camp about 10 miles from where the Selendang Ayu came aground between Spray Cape and Skan Bay.

In an interview Thursday, Hawthorne said the area is remote but spectacular, populated by Steller sea lions, otters and seals. Anglers in the area go after barn-door-sized halibut.

"This is one of those places you only hear about," Hawthorne said. "I get seals coming up right on the beach because killer whales are 15 yards away, chasing them."

Hawthorne said he has heard the western side of Skan Bay is coated with oil and the spill is continuing to drift northwest with the current. That likely would put it on his doorstep.

The 738-foot Selendang Ayu was loaded with soybeans and bound from Seattle to China when it lost power in the Bering Sea. The vessel was following a heavily trafficked shipping lane called the Great Circle Route, which hundreds of ships follow each month on transits between the West Coast of the United States and Asia. Part of the route cuts through the Aleutian Islands; many ships slide through Unimak Pass.

The Coast Guard cutter Alex Haley, tugboats and a salvage vessel tried to assist the freighter but failed. Over two days, the Selendang drifted more than 50 miles southwest to Unalaska, snapping a tow line and an anchor chain before its sole remaining anchor caught hold about 4,000 feet offshore.

Devitt, the James Dunlap mate, said he was listening to radio conversations between the freighter and the cutter as the Selendang floundered. The freighter's master thought he was close to getting its engines started after two days of trying, maybe within an hour.

"Then he could have just driven away," Devitt said. "It sounded like they were going to fix it."

But that last desperate effort also fell short.

An HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter airlifting some of the freighter's last crew members crashed about 6:20 p.m. Wednesday, and the freighter split in half about an hour later.

By Thursday afternoon, the broken ship's halves lay grounded several hundred yards off the rocky beach and perhaps 50 yards apart. The bow portion faced into the Bering Sea, looking as if it were anchored and waiting for its crew to return. The stern of the ship sat lower in the water and listed slightly to the port side.

Each half had been sheared off, exposing the ship's guts to the waves. Water surged in and out, leaving the interior steel structure looking bright and clean.


The Coast Guard doesn't know how much oil had leaked out of the ship, said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Woodley, but it doesn't appear to have drifted out of Skan Bay, he said.

Bunker oil had collected in thick mats close around the ship. Farther out in the bay, it formed rainbow-hued sheens that had been stretched and dissipated by high winds, leaving long brown streaks on the surface.

Closer to shore, oil had turned the clear blue Bering Sea into something closer to chocolate milk. In places, the shoreline looked like a muddy stream had emptied into it.

Oil coated the black-rock beaches in several areas of western Skan Bay, but Woodley said nobody had been ashore yet to survey the damage or look for injured or dead animals. Seabirds and bald eagles were seen in the area.

About a mile south of the ship, the remains of the Coast Guard helicopter that crashed Wednesday had floated ashore. Resting on its belly, it was missing its rotors and cabin and looked as if it had been burned, but the white-and-orange aircraft was actually covered in oil.

Spill response officials hope to start deploying boom today, Woodley said. The primary goal is to prevent oil from reaching four salmon streams in the area.

They may also try to remove oil from the ship, but setting boom around the vessel is not an option, he said. "The weather and sea conditions are way too rough for that," he said. "We had 35-foot seas last night."

Officials will consider cleaning up some beaches, but not the most exposed, Woodley said.

The spill has residents of Unalaska Island nervous, he said. More than 100 packed a meeting Thursday afternoon, asking questions about affected resources and plans for cleaning up the mess.

"It was packed," Woodley said of the meeting. "It's a small town and they're very concerned about this."

One who is particularly nervous is Hawthorne, the operator of the summer fishing lodge, Volcano Bay Adventures.

He knows the area's currents and is sure that oil will soon hit his beach, Hawthorne said. "It'll be a flipping mess," he said. "Regardless how good they clean that up, there will still be oil and oil residue all over the place."

Commercial fishermen worried that the spill will affect the Bering Sea's important fisheries.

The crab fishery around Skan Bay was closed for many years, but just opened up again last year, said Emil Berikoff of the Unalaska Native Fishermen's Association. The majority of the tanner crab taken from around Unalaska last year, he said, came from around Skan Bay.

The tanner fishery is scheduled to open next month.

"It's one of the most productive fisheries grounds around the island," he said. "So what effect that it's going to have, I just don't know."

Berikoff said currents in the bay move east. Very quickly the oil will be in Makushin Bay. "And that's probably going to do a lot of damage to the shellfish."

For Berikoff and other Unalaskans, the memory of the smaller Kuroshima spill in 1997 is troubling. According to the DEC, the Kuroshima dumped about 36,000 gallons of fuel when that seafood freighter went aground on a part of the island easily accessed by road.

"The Kuroshima was bad enough, but this is 10 times that," Berikoff said. He said local fishermen are still feeling the effects of that spill with diminished salmon stocks.

Matt Honan, who works in a building supply store, agreed.

"The concern being brought up is that the Kuroshima was (smaller), and look at how that impacted us. This is huge."

- Reporter Tataboline Brant and The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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