Discussion: Oilspills only matter in the West?

A fairly inflammatory statement I suppose, but it comes of the back of some interesting articles. A multitude of people and places are calling this the

But there's been much worse.... though admittedly this must have got some of the largest media attention, aided I imagine by all the new ways of transmitting these things across the world. This article I read shocked me - not just because it seems to have been ignored then - but that it's being ignored now.

What happened was I found the image below:

Click me to increase my size

This infographic shows a visual representation of spills which have occurred, and the oil they released. This is represented in tonnes, but this handy gallon to 'tonnes of oil equivalent' counter converts the latest estimate (from britishpolluting.com, not BP) of gallons of oil released into tonnes. I'm not sure how accurate this is, but it's a more up to date ballpark than the figure in the picture... about 530,000 tonnes of oil equivalent.

It's an eye opener to me that, with all the devastation we've been witnessing from the Gulf Oil Spill, it'snot the largest to have occurred in the last 20 years - the Gulf War Oilspill of 1991 produced 1,500,000 tonnes. And we here almost nothing about it...

Granted it was almost 20 years ago, and we didn't have all our fancy interwebs back then. But that's a humongous amount of oil... it can't have been eradicated by now can it? Well, that was my question, among others like... what happened, why did it happen, what was done about it - what's being done about it. I mean, when you look into the damage the current one is causing, a spill a magnitude larger is, if nothing else, a good proxy to judge what could happen 20 years from now.

Oil-damaged salt marshes

It occurred on January 23rd 1991, and was not caused by an industrial accident, but by a calculated maneuver by Iraqi forces, who opened the valves at the Sea Island oil terminal into the Persian Gulf - trying to foil an amphibious assault by US marines.

The longterm consequences are dealt with in this paper. The slick was huge, and reached 5 inches thick in some places. Contary to the Gulf of Mexico situation, there was no cleanup atall along the coast of Saudi Arabia, so oil-infected sediment remained for 12 years, penetrating as deep as a couple of feet. As a result, there's no way to remove it now - so the long term impacts, whatever they might be, can't be avoided. Several areas show no recovery atall, with some of the worst affected areas being mangroves and saltmarshes - which are also present on the Louisiana coast. From this it's possible to conclude that these parts of the Mexican Gulf may be the worst affected 20 years from now. But my questions is how could nobody clean this up? Where's the moral outrage that this situation exists?

But it's not just the Gulf. Nigeria supplies 40% of crude to the US, but has been plagued with oil spills for over 50 years, releasing an estimated 1.5 million tonnes, 50 times that released by the Exxon Valdez. That's an Exxon Valdez spill every year.

A recent spill near the village of Otuegwe occurred simply because one of the 40 year old pipelines had eroded to much, and oil leaked freely - ignored by Shell for 6 months. As a result, the rich mangrove forests are now dead and lifeless.

On the 1st May this year, an ExxonMobil pipeline in Akwa Ibom spilled over a million gallons over just days, yet nothing is being done and their claims for compensation are being ignored. Some are even being treat violently and even killed. This seems to be a testement to the power of the multinational oil companies in these poorer countries, leading to some fairly diametric double standards.

A quote from one of the many fishermen devastated by the coast states "We don't have an international media to cover us, so nobody cares about it ... whatever cry we cry is not heard outside of here".