The perils of Arctic oil drilling

There's at least a tiny bit of good news in the grounding of an oil rig in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska: As of midday Wednesday, the Kulluk, which ran aground near Kodiak Island, didn't appear to be leaking fuel, thanks to its double hull of 3-inch-thick steel. We've learned some things about oil and safety since the Exxon Valdez. But the overwhelming lesson of the Kulluk, which broke free of boats trying to tow it to Seattle after its first season in the Beaufort Sea, is that for all the precautions taken by Royal Dutch Shell, neither the company's executives nor federal regulators were fully prepared for the hazardous conditions in the Arctic.

January 3, 2013