China's worst-ever oil spill threatens wildlife wildlife, spill, oil, threatens, China

快樂牛郎

Chinese officials have warned of a severe threat to wildlife from one of the country's worst reported oil spills as an army of volunteers was dispatched to beaches to try to head off the black tides.

At least one man has drowned in crude during the clean-up operation, which has expanded as the area of the slick has doubled in size despite earlier government assurances that it was being contained and posed no risk to ecologically sensitive areas.

Five days after a pipeline explosion at the north-east port of Dalian, oil had reportedly spread over an area of 430 square kilometres, prompting a dispersal mission along the coast.

Hundreds of local volunteers are spreading absorbent matting along the Yellow Sea shoreline in an attempt to stop the slick from damaging beaches.

Out at sea, authorities have started to use oil-consuming bacteria to try to disperse the slick, along with chemical agents and lengthy floating barrages.

Even though maritime officials have mobilised 800 fishing boats to assist the 40 specialist vessels in the operation, the winds and tides are spreading the slick wider and thinner.

The difficult conditions have proved fatal for at least one man. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned on Tuesday when a wave threw him from a vessel, according to the state news agency Xinhua.

In some areas, volunteers equipped only with rubber gloves, rubber boots and rudimentary tools have struggled to cope with the waves washing up on the beaches.

"I've been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil," Zhong Yu of the environmental group Greenpeace China, told the Associated Press. "The oil is half-solid and half-liquid and is as sticky as asphalt."

Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned until the end of August.

"The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals and water quality, and sea birds," Huang Yong, deputy bureau chief for the city's Maritime Safety Administration, told a regional TV station.

The authorities say the leak was staunched within 24 hours of last Friday's accident, but they have yet to reveal how much oil was discharged before then. The state-run China Central television channel estimates the spill at 1,500 tons, less than 0.5% of the amount released into the ocean by the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Local officials have been upbeat about the prospects of a quick clean-up and a resumption of normal services at the port, which has had to redirect 420 vessels from the area of the slick.

"Our priority is to collect the spilled oil within five days to reduce the possibility of contaminating international waters," Dalian's vice mayor, Dai Yulin, told reporters earlier this week. Other officials expect the operation to last twice as long and even then it is far from clear that the ecological damage will end.

快樂牛郎

In China, an oil spill and a low-tech cleanup

By Keith B. Richburg
Friday, July 23, 2010

BEIJING -- Hundreds of firefighters and civilian volunteers used bare hands, chopsticks and plastic garbage bags Thursday to wage a low-tech battle against a giant oil slick spreading off China's northeastern coast.

The slick, near the oil port of Dalian, in Liaoning province, was caused when two pipelines exploded last Friday as crude was being unloaded from a Libyan tanker. Government officials said the accident released about 1,500 tons -- or 400,000 gallons -- of oil into the Yellow Sea, where the slick now covers up to 170 square miles, according to news reports, making it China's largest recorded spill.

The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is estimated in the tens of millions of gallons.

"I used small wood planks to scoop up the oil and put it into big plastic garbage bags," said Liu Jia, a worker at the Dalian beach resort. "Some of my colleagues used chopsticks. . . . It works, because the oil is quite sticky. Sometimes, we just used our hands to pick up the sand that is covered with oil."

Liu described the methods being used as "quite primitive, quite time-consuming."

China National Petroleum Corp. said Thursday that no more oil was leaking from the damaged pipelines, but the port at Dalian remained closed as the black oil continued to wash up onshore. Fishing has been banned in the vicinity at least through August, and several nearby beaches were also declared off-limits at the height of the summer tourist season.

"It should be the best season for the beach right now," said Bao Wulan, head of public relations for the Dalian Golden Beach Tourism Group. She said that 70,000 to 80,000 visitors would normally be in the area this time of year -- "but now, no tourists."

She added: "I don't know how our business can go back to normal. Our beach is almost all polluted."

The environmental group Greenpeace China said it has found oil in bays six miles from Dalian, and Jin****an Golden Beach, more than 20 miles away, was also reportedly affected. Workers were laying straw mats at Jin****an on Thursday in a bid to suck up the crude.

Greenpeace said 10,000 shellfish farms have been contaminated.

The battle against the spreading oil slick has claimed the life of one worker, a firefighter who drowned Tuesday.

Although hundreds of civilian volunteers have been mobilized to help with the cleanup, the lack of equipment has hindered the ad hoc effort.

快樂牛郎

China is using advanced bio-technology to clean up this oil spill, they are doing way better then th ...
peter236 發表於 2010/7/22 19:09

if china had a spill the size of the GOM, you could see a lot of ppl dying.

快樂牛郎

So the guy from US says the spill was actually 100 times bigger than the estimate given by the Chinese gov.

It will be interesting to see how many people will die or get really sick in China in 20 years due to all sorts of pollution.  But China's medical cost will not skyrocket.  They can just simply let people die.