Right now the oil terminal is graced by the presence of the Overseas Shirley – an Aframax tanker built in 2001 and owned by Shirley Tanker SRL. That company has its address in the Barbados, but the operator, OSG Overseas Ship Management, is located in New York, NY. Despite the fact that their motto is “moving energy with integrity,” the company has an interesting criminal record, according to the Department of Justice:
Overseas Shipholding Group Inc. (OSG) has today [12/09/2006] agreed to plead guilty to 33 felony counts related to deliberate vessel pollution from nine ships and false pollution log entries in three additional ships, in six U.S. ports around the nation. OSG will pay a record $37 million—the largest-ever criminal penalty involving deliberate vessel pollution—and plead guilty to charges related to illegal dumping of waste oil, criminal violations of the Clean Water Act/Oil Pollution Act and the Act to Prevent Pollution from Ships, conspiracy, false statements and obstruction of justice. This multi-district investigation was conducted in Boston, Mass.; Portland, Maine; Los Angeles.; San Francisco; Wilmington, N.C.; and Beaumont, Texas.
But it gets better. As the DoJ reports, “OSG is a U.S. corporation headquartered in New York and is one of the largest publicly traded tanker companies in the world” and their ship, the Overseas Shirley, currently in South Portland, was the site of repeated illegal dumping. The 1st Engineer reported that there was habitual
‘sludge discharge to sea’ [concentrated black waste oil] and estimated that approximately 40,600 gallons of sludge had been intentionally dumped overboard through a bypass hose.
Welcome back to Portland!
