Firespill by Ian Slater

Horton.
    The overhead lights were dimmed further as the video tape began to show up on one of the forty-eight-inch screens. After a few flickers, Cronkite appeared, shuffled some papers, glanced down to his right, showing thinning white hair, coughed politely, and looked up. “Good evening. A news flash has reached CBS reporting an international disaster of unprecedented proportions. An ocean area of almost two thousand square miles caught fire early this morning and is now burning fiercely off the North American continent. What is already being described as the largest fire in history was primarily caused by the vast and ever-growing buildup of escaping oil.”
    Superimposed on the lower right of the screen, old film clips of massive worldwide and local pollution formed the background for Cronkite’s description.
    “Environmentalists have long warned that continuing undersea oil seepage, oil from the hundreds of tanker sinkings, and the dumping of waste oil by ships in transit might one day combine to form a huge and potentially inflammable blanket of oil in the North Pacific. Only last week CBS reported the blowout of two Alaskan north slope offshore wells, each spilling more than ten million gallons of crude oil into the sea…”
    As Cronkite continued, the background changed; two model tankers, both broken in half, were shown. “…Now CBS has learned that shortly after dawn this morning, two million-ton supratankers traveling south from oil storage depots in Valdez, Alaska, collided in heavy fog approximately thirty miles off southern Alaska’s Chichagof Island, one of the northernmost islands of the Alexander Archipelago. Both ships were fully loaded, the American, the Kodiak , with crude, the Russian, the Sakhalin , with a cargo of high octane and bunker fuel. It appears that at least one of the ships either was not equipped with the recently developed Marconi anticollision radar or did not have it in operation at the time, although this has not been confirmed. Agents for the ships report that both supratankers, measuring more than nineteen hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide, were carrying a near-capacity cargo of a million tons. This means that a total of more than six hundred million gallons of oil is spilling into the ocean. UPI reports that there is little possibility of survivors. More details on that spill in a moment.”
    The President turned away from the set as a soap commercial came on. He had placed a hand over his eyes as if shading them from an invisible glare. “My God,” he said slowly. “How many gallons did he say?”
    It was Jean Roche who answered. “Six hundred million, Mr. President.” She added hesitantly, “Actually it’s higher than that.”
    “Six hundred mill—! I can’t even imagine that much.”
    There was a long pause. When the President spoke again, he was more composed. “Jean?”
    “Mr. President?”
    “Why are we watching that damned commercial?”
    His aide flushed. “Ah—there was no time to edit it, sir.” And she added quickly, “We didn’t want to lose any footage.”
    The President groaned.
    When Cronkite reappeared, he mentioned something about a report from Juneau, and now a field reporter was taking up the story. “Years ago experts predicted such a freak combination of circumstances somewhere in the world. They warned that should a large amount of gasoline or high octane be present, there would be an imminent danger of fire. Well, the experts have been proven right. Ironically, the fire, which is now igniting the thousands of smaller natural and man-made oil slicks in the area, is suspected to have been started accidentally by a U.S. destroyer. The destroyer was answering the Russian tanker’s distress calls. It has not been heard from since it itself issued an SOS, saying only that it was afire. Experts here believe that the destroyer, the Tyler Maine , entered an area of high gasoline vapor density while en route to the collision site, and