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UNITED STATES v. LOCKE

Opinion of the Court

Puget Sound. Most is extracted from Alaska’s North Slope
reserve and is shipped to Washington on United States ﬂag
vessels. Foreign-ﬂag vessels arriving from nations such
as Venezuela and Indonesia also call at Washington’s oil
installations.

The bulk of oil transported on water is found in tankers,
vessels which consist of a group of tanks contained in a ship-
shaped hull, propelled by an isolated machinery plant at the
stern. The Court described the increase in size and num-
bers of these ships close to three decades ago in Askew v.
American Waterways Operators, Inc., 411 U. S. 325, 335
(1973), noting that the average vessel size increased from
16,000 tons during World War II to 76,000 tons in 1966.
(The term “tons” refers to “deadweight tons,” a way of mea-
suring the cargo-carrying capacity of the vessels.) Between
1955 and 1968, the world tanker ﬂeet grew from 2,500 vessels
Ibid. By December 1973, 366 tankers in the
to 4,300.
world tanker ﬂeet were in excess of 175,000 tons, see 1
M. Tusiani, The Petroleum Shipping Industry 79 (1996), and
by 1998 the number of vessels considered “tankers” in the
merchant ﬂeets of the world numbered 6,739, see U. S. Dept.
of Transp., Maritime Administration, Merchant Fleets of the
World 1 (Oct. 1998).

The size of these vessels, the frequency of tanker opera-
tions, and the vast amount of oil transported by vessels with
but one or two layers of metal between the cargo and the
water present serious risks. Washington’s waters have
been subjected to oil spills and further threatened by near
misses.
In December 1984, for example, the tanker ARCO
Anchorage grounded in Port Angeles Harbor and spilled
239,000 gallons of Alaskan crude oil. The most notorious oil
spill in recent times was in Prince William Sound, Alaska,
where the grounding of the Exxon Valdez released more
than 11 million gallons of crude oil and, like the Torrey Can-
yon spill before it, caused public ofﬁcials intense concern
over the threat of a spill.