With the Exxon Valdez disaster still grim and fresh in memory, any new spill would suffice to trigger a bad case of public jitters. As rotten luck would have it, last weekend brought three spills in a little more than twelve hours.
At 4:30 p.m. Friday, the Greek tanker World Prodigy struck a rock at Brenton Reef, just south of Newport, R.I., spewing about 600,000 gal. of fuel that immediately began drifting toward Newport Harbor. A few hours later, a tanker collided with an oil-filled barge near Houston, releasing 250,000 gal. of oil. Then, shortly before 5 a.m. Saturday, a tanker...