12 November 2007

TurmOil

The seas have been seriously polluted this past week in two separate incidences on opposite ends of the world.
Due to an unusual amount of fog on the morning of November 7th, a Cosco Busan oil tanker struck a tower of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, CA. The collision caused the tanker to suffer a long gash from the bow to the stern, releasing 58,000 gallons of fuel oil into the ocean.
"This is a major spill," said Wil Bruhns, a division chief at the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board. "It certainly has the potential to cause damage to birds, fish and other wildlife."
Oil spill clean-ups have continued to advance with every passing crisis; if rescuers can get to it in time. The Coast Guard initially called the spill minor but later realized the amount of fuel was greater than first thought. Environmentalists faulted the U.S. Coast Guard for not notifying organizational clean-up crews fast enough and for being slow to put inflatable booms on the water's surface to prevent oil from spreading. While San Francisco is hard at work cleaning wildlife and 58,000 gallons of fuel out of the water, Russia is scrambling to recover from a catastrophic accident.
A severe storm broke a small Russian oil tanker in two off the Ukrainian port of Kerch on Sunday, spilling up to 2,000 tons of fuel oil into the ocean. Russia's Environmental Agency's major concern right now is that of the migratory birds since the spill happened at the center of a migration route from central Siberia into the Black Sea of the seabirds, the red-throated and black-throated Siberian divers and now is the peak of their migration. The same area is also home to porpoises not to mention the countless fish.
"This problem may take a few years to solve. Fuel oil is a heavy substance and it is now sinking to the seabed," Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of Russia's environment agency Rosprirodnadzor told state-run Vesti-24 television channel.
"This is a very serious environmental disaster." Source.

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