The channel at the mouth of Tampa Bay has taken warships and a bridge; in 1993 it took a different kind of toll, an environmental one. Before dawn on an August morning, three vessels collided in the channel just south of Mullet Key, a barge caught fire, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of heavy oil poured into the water at the entrance to the bay. The oil that washed up on Fort De Soto's beaches that month is a reminder that the modern dangers of this channel are industrial, and that the same geography which made the bay worth guarding makes it dangerously easy to foul.
At about a quarter to six on the morning of 10 August 1993, in the narrow shipping channel west of the Sunshine Skyway and south of Mullet Key, three vessels came together in the dark. Inbound were two petroleum barges: the small Bouchard 155, pushed by the tug Capt. Fred Bouchard, which was limping with a failed starboard engine, and behind it the large barge Ocean 255, pushed by the tug Seafarer and loaded with nearly eight million gallons of jet fuel, gasoline, and diesel. Outbound from Port Manatee came the four-hundred-foot bulk freighter Balsa 37, carrying six thousand metric tons of phosphate. As the vessels met at a bend, the Ocean 255 struck the Balsa 37, which then, less than a minute later, sheared into the Bouchard 155 and tore open its tanks. There was no loss of life; the crews in the water were pulled out within the hour. But the channel had become a disaster.
The collision set off three emergencies at once. The Balsa 37, holed and listing, was run aground south of the channel near Egmont Key to keep it from capsizing. The Ocean 255 caught fire on impact, and the Seafarer tow grounded near Fort De Soto Park, where a fuel tank exploded and the barge burned out of control for most of a day until the Tampa Fire Department, ferrying its engines out on military landing craft, finally put it out that evening. And the Bouchard 155, its hull ruptured, bled its cargo into the bay: roughly eight thousand barrels, around three hundred thousand gallons, of heavy No. 6 fuel oil, along with some thirty-two thousand gallons of the lighter fuels. The port was closed to all traffic.
For the first four days, an uncommon stroke of luck held: the winds and tides carried the slick fifteen to thirty miles offshore, buying the response crews precious time to prepare the beaches. Then a storm system pushed the oil back ashore on the fourteenth and fifteenth of August, and it came in along the lower Gulf beaches. In the end the spill fouled some thirteen to fourteen miles of fine sand beach from St. Pete Beach north to the Redington shores, oiled the beaches of Egmont Key and the mangrove islands at John's Pass and Blind Pass, smeared more than thirty miles of residential seawall in Boca Ciega Bay, and reached the fringing mangroves on the north side of Mullet Key itself. It struck at the worst season, with birds and sea turtles nesting, and injured birds, turtles, mangroves, seagrasses, salt marshes, and shellfish beds alike. Yet the prepared, fast response, helped by those four offshore days, saved more than eighty percent of the oiled birds the crews could capture, a far better outcome than the Exxon Valdez disaster four years before. Cleanup took about three weeks and some thirty-five million dollars.
The 1993 spill belongs beside the Blackthorn and the Skyway in the modern record of the bay's mouth, but it is a different species of catastrophe, slower and dirtier, measured not in lives lost but in oiled birds and fouled sand and the painstaking labor of cleanup, the characteristic disaster of a working industrial port. It carried a national lesson, too. It was the first major oil spill in the United States after the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, the law Congress passed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez, and the first real test of NOAA's new rapid spill-assessment program. The Bouchard 155, a single-hulled barge built before that law required double hulls, was later rebuilt with a double hull and renamed; in 2017, off the Texas coast, it caught fire and exploded again, killing two crew. The channel that Fort De Soto was built to defend has become a place where the gravest threats arrive not on enemy decks but in the holds of ordinary commerce, and the park's beaches, the very thing that draws millions of visitors, sit permanently downstream of that traffic.