A Taiwanese supertanker skimmed oil from the Gulf of Mexico yesterday as the months-long disaster became the worst accidental spill on record.
Rough seas and strong winds continued to delay clean-up efforts, displace protective booms and push the oil deeper into fragile coastal wetlands, endangering wildlife preserves and the thousands of birds nesting there.
“This is going to be a very long and arduous clean-up operation in the days to come,” US Coast Guard Admiral Paul Zukunft said. “I’m especially concerned with some of the wildlife habitats.”
PHOTO: EPA
An estimated 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day have been gushing out of the ruptured well since the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig sank on April 22, about 80km off the coast of Louisiana.
A containment system has captured about 557,000 barrels of oil, but rough seas have delayed the deployment of a third vessel, which is set to increase capacity from 25,000 barrels to 53,000 barrels a day. That means an estimated 1.9 million to 3.6 million barrels of oil has now gushed into the Gulf.
Using the high end of that estimate, the spill has now surpassed the 1979 Ixtoc blowout, which took nine months to cap and dumped an estimated 3.3 million barrels into the Gulf of Mexico.
It is topped only by the deliberate release of 6 million to 8 million barrels of crude by Iraqi troops, who destroyed tankers and oil terminals and set wells ablaze in Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War.
And it will likely take until the middle of next month, at the earliest, before the Gulf well is permanently capped by injecting mud and cement with the aid of relief wells.
The Monrovian-flag supertanker provided by TMT Shipping of Taiwan could radically increase the amount of oil crews are able to recover.
“It ingests oil and oily water and then separates out the oil and expels the water,” BP spokesman Toby Odone said.
The giant ship, which has cuts in its sides, is abou 275m long and can suck up 21 million gallons (about 80 million liters) of oily water a day.
The small skimming boats that have been patrolling the Gulf for the past 10 weeks have only collected 28.2 million gallons of oily water to date.
The tanker began initial skimming operations on Friday, with crews testing whether it could safely handle and dispose of the oil, but it will take several days before a final deployment decision is made, Odone said.
Rough seas caused by the first hurricane of the Atlantic season have kept the thousands of ships hired to skim oil, lay boom, carry out controlled burns and move equipment in harbor since Tuesday.
Skimmers had been collecting about 12,000 barrels of oil a day before they were sent back to port, while about 8,000 barrels of oil was being burned off the surface.
About 725km of US shorelines have now been oiled as crude spews into the sea at an alarming rate, 73 days into the worst environmental disaster in US history.
A third containment ship aimed at doubling the amount of oil captured from a rupture well in the Gulf of Mexico should hopefully be working by Wednesday, said Admiral Thad Allen, who oversees operations.
The deployment of the Helix Producer is set to increase capacity from about 25,000 to 53,000 barrels of oil per day.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS