War tanker's perils surface in Pacific
In a lifeboat tossed by stormy waters six miles off Cambria, Calif., seaman Richard Quincy, 22, was jolted with terror as he watched the Montebello sink. As the torpedoed oil tanker's stern catapulted into the air, the Japanese submarine I-21 was firing at Quincy and the other crewmen who were desperately trying to row away from the disaster.
In that dawn two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the 38 men aboard all made it to shore.
But the Montebello plunged to the ocean floor with 3 million gallons of oil -- about the amount that fouled Santa Barbara, Calif., beaches in the 1969 spill that contributed to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Shrouded in fishing nets snagged from trawlers above, the World War II wreck has sat in the the ocean's depths for six decades.
Recently, though, researchers in a high-technology sub diving 900 feet have gingerly explored the vessel, to keep an obscure bit of history alive -- and a huge load of potentially perilous freight buried under the sea.
In the days before the Montebello went down Dec. 23, 1941, anxiety was sky high. Nine Japanese submarines were lurking off the West Coast. In the previous 24 hours, the I-21 had fired torpedoes at two other US freighters, but had missed.
In seaside towns, people talked about heading inland. At 3:50 a.m., a torpedo from the I-21 harmlessly rammed ashore, shaking houses and fraying nerves along California's central coast. Not two hours later, the Montebello was hit.
As the United States started fighting in earnest, reverberations from such attacks abated, and the exact location of the wrecked Montebello was forgotten.
Now, researchers from two of California's marine sanctuaries are trying to answer a disturbing question: Could the barnacle-encrusted relic -- whose hull is too deep to raise and whose oil-draining would be too costly to contemplate -- poison the waters around it and tar the beaches nearby?
The good news is that, judging from data being analyzed after a series of dives in September, the 83-year-old Montebello is intact.
The ship, the length of 1 1/2 football fields, is "in remarkably good shape," said Robert Schwemmer, a shipwreck expert with the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary. "It's a pretty awesome sight. She's sitting perfectly upright, as if she had just left the dock. Her rudder is perfectly straight."
More important, the tanks with their vast reservoir of oil evidently have not given out. Frame by frame, scientists are comparing videos of their first Montebello expedition in 1996 with those shot last fall. There doesn't seem to be much difference.
"Nothing indicates that the oil is not still entombed," Schwemmer said, adding that with frigid seafloor temperatures, the Montebello's cargo probably has congealed into a goop as thick as peanut butter. According to one theory, the tanks are still in one piece partly because pressure from the semisolid stuff on the inside is countering the pressure of the ocean on the outside.
Whatever the reason, the oil's apparent stability is a relief to residents, as are plans to monitor the wreck every five years.
"The last thing we need on our relatively pristine coastline is a leaking oil tanker," said the San Luis Obispo County supervisor, Shirley Bianchi.
Stemming a leak would cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Several years ago, Schwemmer helped investigators pinpoint the sunken freighter Jacob Luckenbach as the source of a periodic oil slick that had mired thousands of seabirds. Resting 17 miles off San Francisco, the vessel held less than 3 percent of the amount of oil still inside the Montebello; draining it still cost more than $19 million.
Furthermore, the Montebello's flat, sandy patch of seafloor is just a mile from the southern edge of the Monterey
For decades, only fishing boats chugged around the wreck, casting nets for the sea life below. In 1996, a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the nation's marine sanctuaries, explored it in the Delta, a sub that accommodates two crew members.
The Delta has some history: It has been used to pore over the Lusitania, the Edmund Fitzgerald and other fabled wrecks. The team had two aims. One was to help preserve a little-studied slice of history. In the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese subs were dispatched to disrupt supply routes and spread panic along the West Coast.
Off Eureka, a sub torpedoed the tanker Emidio, killing five crewmen. On Christmas Eve, the freighter Absaroka was hit just off Los Angeles; it limped into port with one death.
The researchers' more pressing goal was to check the Montebello for oil leaks -- an elaborate search that even involved hunting for bacteria drawn to hydrocarbons.
Although the ship was in surprisingly good shape, scientists were vexed by a mystery: They didn't know the density of the oil that the Montebello had taken on, an important factor for predicting the likelihood of a leak.
After reading a newspaper story, Richard Quincy called marine sanctuary officials with the answer: At Port San Luis, the Vancouver-bound ship had taken on Santa Maria crude -- oil so thick it had to be heated just to flow.
"I happened to be turning the valves the night we loaded it," Quincy said.
Retired from a long career at sea and on the docks, Quincy lives in Danville, just east of Oakland. At 84, he still recounts vivid memories of the torpedo slamming into the Montebello's hull. The ship listed violently, and Olaf Erickson -- who had been captain for all of one night -- sounded the order to abandon ship. As high seas crashed over the bow, Quincy was standing watch in the murky hours before dawn. He had been aboard for crossings to places as far off as Siberia but never had he seen anything like the huge dark mass of the sub that suddenly emerged just 300 yards off the Montebello's stern.
"I saw a little flash in the darkness," he said, "and then it hit."
Quincy declined an invitation last September to inspect his old ship from inside the research sub.
"They called me the day I got out of the hospital," he said. "I told my cardiologist I had a chance to go down, and she about jumped out of her skin."
It's a tricky expedition for anyone. Collapsed masts and other structures, draped in billowing fishing nets, protrude through the underwater darkness.
"With those nets hanging from the poles," Quincy said, "it has a real ghost-ship feel, but it's teeming with life," said Jean de Marignac, a biologist with the marine sanctuary.
Thousands of crabs skitter along the deck. Sponges and anemones have planted themselves on the hull, and passing fish are trapped in the waving nets.
Watching videos of the dives, Quincy knows now that he and his crewmates would have been incinerated in a huge fireball if the torpedo had pierced the hull just 12 feet from where it did. It hit an empty storage area rather than a full oil tank.
Sanctuary officials are considering a Montebello display in a visitor center near San Simeon, and it's not too soon for Quincy. "I don't know how many people I've talked to who have never heard of the Montebello," he said. "I had one fellow call me a liar."
