Remembering the Solar oil spill
August 13th, 2008 | by Site Administrator |By Edgar Manaay
bareFACTS, The Daily Guardian
TWO YEARS have lapsed since August 11, 2006 when Motor Tanker Solar I sank off the coast of Nueva Valencia, Guimaras and triggered the worst oil spill in the country.
The tanker settled 2,000 ft. in the sea bottom where water pressure is at 65 tons/sq.ft. and the temperature at 15 degrees centigrade.
M/T Solar I was chartered by Petron Corporation to deliver two million liters of bunker fuel oil from Petron Bataan Refinery to a power plant in Iligan when it sank in the waters off Guimaras amidst bad weather.
Subsequent high tech recovery operations eight months after the sinking resulted in the recovery of only 30,000 liters from the sunken tanker. It is assumed that nearly all of the two million liters of bunker fuel was spilled in the seas of Western Visayas.
A news item in the August 11, 2008 issue of The Daily Guardian, which is exactly two years since the oil spill, says that only P100 million out of the P900 million budget for the oil spill was used for the rehabilitation of affected areas. This writer will be looked upon as a “contrabida” to our readers, but I sincerely believe that the damage inflicted by the oil spill is VERY MINIMAL and that the P900-million rehabilitation fund is an OVERKILL.
Let’s be honest with ourselves. We have blown out of proportion the effects of the oil spill, the media sensationalized it while environmental activists such as Purzuelo, Lim and Oso took advantage of the tragedy to spin scare stories. This made their group popular with the people of Guimaras and helped advance their environmental activism.
Politicians also swindled Petron by encouraging false claimants (and those living in the mountains of Guimaras) to file damages claims.
Some of the executives of Petron who came over to officially face the public and to “settle other problems” were batch mates of mine in Petron many years ago where I worked for 15 years. I am privy to the name of the persons both in media and politics who were given “settlement money,” but of course I cannot mention them publicly.
While the oil spill is the worst in the history of Iloilo, the episode can also be considered as a dark chapter in our history as a people. It exposes the flaws of the Ilonggo character especially to the foreigners, as deceitful, corrupt and charlatans. Even the International Oil Pollution Compensation (IOPC) was aghast to process claims which exceeded the population in the shore line by more than five times! Politicians from both Guimaras and Iloilo were encouraging and discouraging false claimants to suit their own political agenda.
Within 24 hours of the incident, this writer was over the radio suggesting the mobilization of oil booms having had 20 years of experience in the oil industry. Two days after, the RISE people were already parroting oil booms as if they have seen or used one before! That’s a charlatan of the highest order. They then begun to spin a series of horror stories such as mangroves being dissipated (when in fact right now the mangroves thrived better), that the underground water in Guimaras will be contaminated with oil which is a stupid deduction because underground water flows from inland towards the sea due to a hydraulic gradient. They also claim that the sunken tanker is like a “ticking time bomb” ready to explode any moment because of the rusting ship not knowing that at 2000 feet there is no dissolve oxygen, hence, no oxidation and no rusting of the tanker!
Today two years after the oil spill, what is most alarming is that the government has not implemented rules and regulations that will minimize, if not totally prevent, the occurrence of a similar disaster in the future.
Marina and Coast Guard are still lax in the inspection and certification of the sea worthiness of oil tankers. They have designated an oil tanker route for the entire country and the double hull tanker requirement is not yet implemented.
The environmental activists such as RISE is business as usual in spinning horror stories, this time on the proposed coal-fired power plant in Iloilo City.
Why is it that we never learn the lessons of the past? If we cannot remember the past and learn from it, then we are condemned to repeat the same flaws and mistakes in the future.