A barge collided with a massive oil tanker this morning about five miles off the coast of South Korea, damaging the tanker's single hull in three places and resulting in an oil spill estimated at about 2.7 million gallons. The over four-mile-long oil slick is slowly making its way toward what were once probably some very nice beaches and a national maritime park. An official at the country's fisheries ministry said, "This is the country's worst oil spill. We worry about an ecological disaster." South Korea's previous largest offshore spill occurred in July 1995 when a tanker struck a rock. However, officials hope the more wintry conditions this time around will help slow the spread of the spilled oil.
source: Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse
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Comments View as Flat
John former Marine Posted 2:11 am
07 Dec 2007
This is terrible...
When I hear something like this, my usual humor and sarcasm is just crushed right out of me. This totally sucks...and yet, my apartment is heated with oil and my Civic runs on oil. This is my fault but I don't really know what to do about it. I have to take this opportunity, however, to point out that, as of yet, there haven't been any wind or solar spills ruining miles of coastlines. Can we please kick all of the NIMBYs out of Vermont and get some wind power here!
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Wolverine Posted 5:34 am
07 Dec 2007
Cause & Solution
What individuals can do aside from political work is to consume as little as possible (this includes reducing oil consumption by either eliminating or reducing driving), put solar panels on your roof, and put a wind generator in your yard.
However, I strongly object to calling people NIMBYs for wanting to preserve natural areas in their natural states. I also oppose putting wind generators or any other human-made objects in natural areas. Power generation should be as local as possible, beginning with solar panels on every roof and wind generators in every yard and parking lot. Aesthetic harm is also environmental harm; even the right wing U.S. Supreme Court recognizes this.
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John former Marine Posted 5:44 am
07 Dec 2007
Ummm...natural areas?
They don't seem to have a problem with putting ski resorts on half of the mountains here.
But I'll agree with you 100% that aesthetic harm is also bad and that if we're going to put up power generation, it should be concentrated in areas that are already developed.
My hometown of Madawaska, Maine has a huge wind generator right on main street that was put up at the busiest gas station in town. The town didn't object to selling millions of gallons of gasoline. But they decided that the "whishing" sound of the wind generator just couldn't be tolerated. So it just stands there...locked in place.
I guess what I'm getting at is that our values are all out of whack.
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John former Marine Posted 5:45 am
07 Dec 2007
should have used a different term...
I guess NIMBY isn't really a good term to use anyways. It's not their back yard...it's MY back yard. They only spend a couple of weeks a year here in their beautiful homes.
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caniscandida Posted 7:07 am
07 Dec 2007
Madawaska!
Quelle surprise! Quelle coincidence! Que le monde est petit, n'est-ce pas?! My husband was just last week considering a job opening at the University of Maine in Fort Kent. Well, for about five minutes. We love Maine, but that is a bit too far out for us New Yorkers.
"Shu pas a vende" is perhaps "Je ne suis pas a` vendre," in Quebecois? Garry Trudeau manages to work a few cute expressions into "Doonesbury" every now and again, like "Fiche-moi d'la paix, hein!," on the lips of a hockey player.
But you know, when Celine Dion got married, and then again when she had her baby baptized, she went both times to la Basilique Notre-Dame de Montreal: voila` tes moeurs, tes racines, ton peuple, ton sang! : )
Back to the shipping news, and East Asians at sea, on, coincidentally, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day: We can try to regulate problems bit by bit, e.g. complain about single-hulled oil tankers; we can scrutinize what went wrong in San Francisco Bay, when the Hong Kong tanker collided with the Bay Bridge and spilled lots of oil, not long ago. But also, more generally, we can complain too about all sorts of violations of regulations, or weird and unwholesome accommodations to regulations, in the fishing industry: the fate of the Atlantic bluefin tunas; violations reported by Oceana's observation vessel in the western Mediterranean; dumping of bycatch; dumping of over-quota protected fish that cannot legally be brought to market.
International shipping is an ancient practice, with venerable, decadent, opaque traditions, many of them wicked and destructive because there is a lot of money involved. Our pleasing-sounding attempts at regulation are, as it were, so many band-aids (elastic plasters), which just wash off in the salt water.
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