Damage from Philippine oil spill growing, (time bomb)

[donsu]

http://mdn.mainichi-msn.co.jp/international/news/p20060816p2g00m0in030000c.html


Damage from Philippine oil spill growing, sunken fuel tanker likened to time bomb


The Philippines' worst oil spill is threatening to plunge one of the country's poorest provinces deeper into poverty, officials said Wednesday as they tried to contain a leak from a sunken tanker.

The Solar I, carrying 2 million liters of fuel oil, sank Friday in deep waters south of the island province of Guimaras.

Provincial Gov. Joaquin Nava said the oil spill has affected or damaged 15 square kilometers of coral reefs, over 200 kilometers of coastline, 1,000 hectares of marine reserves, at least two resort islands and 50 hectares of seaweed plantations.

Nava said about a third of his province's 150,000 constituents live off the sea and an estimated 10,000 residents of coastal villages who rely on fishing are temporarily without livelihood.
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killing the oceans swiftly if not silently

tick, tick, tick

[vickitulsa]

1. Such reports never cease to enrage those of us who understand

the grim future they signal. The average person has no idea -- and cares not to think about -- just how MANY spills like this occur all around the world. Every day, every week, every month, year after year and decade after decade, the toxic spills continue, and their affect on our world is cumulative.

Little wonder scientists are being "surprised" by ever more marine "Dead Zones," where almost no oxygen at all exists anymore so virtually no life can inhabit them. Very different from the so-called dead zone in the human brain, which could promise great things by way of future development. Marine Dead Zones may very well be the canaries in the mines when it comes to foreseeing disaster ahead for planet Earth.

More sad news from the article about the Philippines spill:

"Only lately, we pulled ourselves out of the 20 poorest (provinces in the Philippines). Now I suppose we will be going back," Nava told The Associated Press, adding that the worst-hit economic sectors were tourism and fishing.

The provincial government on Monday declared a "state of calamity" in Guimaras, which allows the speedy release of relief funds in the area, about 500 kilometers southeast of Manila.

Valladolid town, in nearby Negros Occidental province east of Guimaras, made a similar declaration Tuesday as the oil slick approached its shores.

Once a spill begins, unless it is very short lived it just spreads ever farther, ruining and killing everything it touches and lasting for such a very long time. I know the earth's oceans are vast and that it's hard for most people to comprehend how so much deep open water could ever be contaminated badly enough to cause massive catastrophes. But we have to remember that most of the accidents involving tankers occur in coastal areas. The transition zones where water meets land are the most challenging places on the planet to the wildlife that live there.

Not only living things face an environment that is difficult to navigate, however. Shorelines are the places which change more radically and constantly than any others. And since this is where the ports are, where tankers must put in to unload their cargo into pipelines, it's the world's coastal areas that bear the brunt of spills.

Most often the toxic petroleum products that tankers haul don't leak and then spread out in the middle of the ocean, where they could conceivably be greatly diluted and cause less harm -- or at least less quickly. No, the vast majority of spills happen all along our coastlines, where it just so happens the majority of humans live as well!

In 1973, I worked for Williams Brothers Engineering, which was a huge company in Tulsa whose clients were almost exclusively in the oil and gas industry. The designs my group was developing were for the largest tankers yet dreamed of, and they were ALL designed to be DOUBLE-HULLED at that time. It was expected by everyone in the industry that all future tankers were going to be built that way.

But the laws demanding that this be the case were gutted or never passed, or suspended "temporarily," and the greedy oil giants didn't spend money on double hulls when they could get away with using single hulls instead. If the Exxon Valdez had been double-hulled AS PROMISED by the consortium that built the TransAlaska Pipeline, it's quite possible there would have been very little spillage from that accident.

The last paragraph from the article indicates that such spills as the latest one in the Philippines just keep on happening:

Last year, more than 300,000 liters of fuel oil spilled when a tanker ran aground near central Semirara island. (AP)

This trend won't stop; and the devastation of our marine environment that is so critical to humanity's survival won't end until laws with teeth are enforced around the world.

Jacques Cousteau wrote way back in 1976 that if drastic changes weren't made, he believed the killing of our oceans by practices of humans would reach a tipping point within ten years which would put us at the point of no return, where the death process could not be reversed. He sent out a seven page letter he'd written himself to all the members of the Cousteau Society that year -- he felt it was that important to warn everyone so that the crisis could be averted. Poor man was spitting into the wind, I guess....