With Earth Day coming up (yes, those folks in Kingston couldn’t wait) this weekend, it’d be nice to know that everyone working in potentially volatile situations was taking extra precautions to protect the environment. Yes, it would be nice but so would a lot of things, winning the lottery, for instance.

Unfortunately, it’s not in the cards or — as the case may be with Lotto — tickets. Speaking of tickets, or rather citations, one would think after shelling out $4.5 million for cleanup work and paying a stiff $577,000 fine, Foss Maritime and those it associates with would be more careful while refueling.

One would think they would be. But one would be wrong in this assumption. Just days after getting dinged by the Washington State Department of Ecology for its 2003 spill at Point Wells, which leaked 4,700 gallons of heavy oil into the Puget Sound and marred the once pristine shoreline at Doe-Kag-Wats, reports came in that Foss was at it again. This time it was a smaller spill at the Port of Tacoma. Just 20 gallons went into the Blair Waterway. Once again, overfueling was to blame and while Southern Ship Management Ltd., of Chile, South America has been named the responsible party, the fact that a Foss tug was again involved in such an accident should raise eyebrows — if not hackles.

Sure, it was just 20 gallons but the fact remains that the local maritime company was again involved in soiling the environment. With the recent fine still likely working its way through the banks and Earth Day on its way, we feel pretty slighted by this second oversight by Foss and its associates and question comments made by Bruce Reeds, VP of operations, at Doe-Kag-Wats last week: “The spill was an unfortunate event and Foss has taken the lessons learned from the incident and applied them to our oil-transfer operations.”