25 years after Exxon Valdez, oil spills ain’t what they used to be. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, if you are the sort of person who likes to relax on the weekend by reading about past environmental catastrophes, this Monday is the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Happy anniversary, Exxon Valdez oil spill! If we were married, we would give you silver. But we’re not married, except in that way we all are inextricably bound together in a global web of shared ecology. In which case you probably wouldn’t want silver anyway, because of the downstream effects, so let’s just keep it at congratulations. So: 25 years after Capt. Money, mostly. But the main legacy that environmentalists produced in the wake of the Exxon Valdez was 1990′s Oil Pollution Act. The trust fund is financed by a tax on crude, and this is where it gets interesting. Another legacy of the Oil Pollution Act was that oil spill response training isn’t evenly distributed. A report published this summer by the U.S. A lot has changed in 25 years. It only takes otters 25 years to recover from an oil spill. Kinda hard to believe, but the Exxon Valdez oil spill was 25 years ago.
“Yeah, sheesh,” says the sea otter population that has spent this entire time struggling to recover from the spill’s effects. Back in 1989, the 10.8 million gallons of crude oil that leaked into Prince William Sound killed otters and 20 other species. Roughly 1,000 otters died from the spill right away, and lingering oil in clams (otter food) and in otters’ fur slowly killed 1,000 to 2,000 more otters later. Thankfully, a new study indicates the number of sea otters off Alaska’s southern coast is finally back to normal – although it sure took long enough.
Explains Reuters: The report’s findings underscore the lengthy recovery times for many species affected by oil spills, U.S. A Anglet, « pollution limitée » après le naufrage d'un cargo. Le Monde.fr | • Mis à jour le | Par Marie-Béatrice Baudet (avec AFP) Le naufrage du cargo espagnol Luno, qui s'est encastré mercredi 5 février dans une digue de la plage d'Anglet (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), ne devrait pas provoquer de pollution majeure sur les côtes françaises.
Le cargo de 100,65 mètres de long et 14,80 mètres de large, pesant 3 446 tonnes, était vide lorsqu'il s'est brisé, mais il contenait 127 m3 de fioul, soit à peu près l'équivalent de quatre camions-citernes. Si une fuite de gasoil a été constatée dans la matinée, le maire d'Anglet Jean Espilondo a assuré que « la majorité du carburant est contenue dans la coque [laquelle] ne s'est pas échouée », ajoutant « pollution massive écartée » dans un message sur son compte Twitter. Le ministre des transports, Frédéric Cuvillier, a confirmé que « les risques de pollution massive sont a priori écartés ».
Lire notre éclairage : A quoi servent les plans Polmar anti-pollution ? Une marée noire de 50 000 litres souille l'île de Koh Sameh en Thaïlande. Depuis lundi, la marine thaïlandaise travaille au nettoyage de la plage d'Ao Phrao de Koh Samet, dans le sud du pays.
En effet, une brèche dans un oléoduc a entraîné le relâchement en mer, dans le Golfe de Thaïlande, de 50.000 litres de pétrole brut. Avez-vous déjà partagé cet article? Partager sur Facebook Partager sur Twitter. Thai tourist paradise wrecked by oil spill. What could be lovelier than a vacation at Thailand’s Coconut Bay?
Right now, just about anything. Thousands of gallons of crude gushed from a ruptured pipeline into the Gulf of Thailand over the weekend, blackening shorelines that had recently been bustling with tourists. Some beaches have been closed; others have simply been deserted. The Last Surviving Otter from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Has Died. Written by Stephen Messenger When a female sea otter named Homer was born near the cool, clean waters along Alaska’s Prince William Sound, her life must have seemed destined to play out much as it had for countless generations before her.
But that all changed one fateful day in the early spring of 1989, and things would never be the same for her, or anything else, again. On May 29 of that year, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef just offshore, spilling some 10 million gallons of oil into the surrounding aquatic ecosystem — leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Both immediately, and in the days that followed the spill, wildlife died by the thousands. BP stops cleanup in three Gulf states — and starts funding a new beachfront hotel.
BP’s oil-spill cleanup operations have formally wrapped up in three of the four states that were polluted following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010.
After more than three years of cleanup, that sounds like an occasion to party and then relax. But it isn’t. Gulf oil wells have been leaking since 2004 hurricane. Oil has been gushing from a group of wells south of New Orleans since a platform at the site was wiped out by Hurricane Ivan in 2004, and it appears that nothing is being done to staunch or control the leaking.
Efforts to cap the ruptures seem to have been abandoned in 2011. Instead of working to clean up or stop the spill, driller Taylor Energy Company is now providing the government with daily updates about the resultant slick. Even those updates appear to be half-baked. A long ribbon of oil can clearly be seen spilling out from the site, but Taylor Energy claims it’s much smaller than does NOAA. On June 1, NOAA reported to the Coast Guard that the slick was 20.2 miles long and a mile wide. That same day, a routine report filed by someone whom activists assume to be a Taylor Energy consultant stated that the slick was 6.5 miles long. Even if the lower estimate were correct, it should be bad enough to set off alarm bells somewhere in the federal government.
Prestige. Affaire Total / Erika. Marée noire en Nouvelle-Zélande: De nouvelles fractures sur la coque du cargo échoué. Le risque d'une vaste marée noire dans une des plus belles baies de Nouvelle-Zélande s'est accru ce mercredi avec l'apparition de nouvelles fractures sur la coque d'un porte-conteneur échoué, dont le capitaine a été arrêté.
«Nous avons identifié des fractures d'usure sur (la coque du) navire. Un savon collant pour nettoyer les marées noires. Et si on pouvait nettoyer la mer avec du savon?