The collision between a tanker and a cargo ship happened some 13km off the shores of Singapore three days prior to that, spilling an estimated 2,000 – 5,000 tonnes of bintu light crude (depending on sources) into the water. The preliminary story I picked up was in a Malaysian news article as follows.
http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/5/28/nation/6355091&sec=nation
The problem I have with this and other press releases I have read is that it’s being treated like it’s no big deal, that the mess isn’t a problem. From articles I have read, I have seen statements such as “the light crude will evaporate from prolonged exposure to the sun” and “efforts have been positive, more or less”. Now, while all this may be true and honestly, I am no organic chemist, my gut feel is that the importance of the event and the profile of the response to it has been understated. Especially when you compare the reactions (admittedly on grossly different scales, I will grant you) on different sides of the pacific to similar dramas. Both are in major oil territories; the Gulf of Mexico for drilling and Singapore as an entrepot for storage and refineries.
http://sg.yfittopostblog.com/2010/05/25/oil-spill-off-singapore-after-vessels-collide/
Living so close to the beach, I took myself for a run on Saturday 30th to see how the ‘response’ was being enacted and the progress made to date, given the expectation of the authorities that the situation would be dealt with by Sunday. There’d been no official warning to stay away, besides, the Sundown Marathon was to go ahead along the east coast park that evening.
The powers that be had allocated 100-125 personnel to combat the spill, stopping it spreading to the sand which was where animal life was at risk and as I trotted along to the beach I could see many people milling around in the usual way that outdoor workers do here, slowly.
Don’t get me wrong, you’d expect the authorities to have been prepared for this, and they were. You can’t run such a massive operation here and not be ready for collisions. But the assembled team was a rag-tag collection of labourers, mostly Indian from what I could see, dressed in a variety of bizarre non-uniform uniforms; jeans, track-suits, short-sleeved shirts, sandals, running shoes, bandana facemasks and towels wrapped around heads to keep the sun off. One or two guys had donned the worker’s traditional high-visibility jackets, but more so as an accessory rather than to be seen. From a safety perspective, all I noticed was one guy using safety gloves to pick up the oil-covered sand (safety gloves made of black polythene refuse bags) and one guy using a face-mask to protect himself from the fumes (a face-mask that was actually a knitted, black balaclava). It was a motley crew indeed.
The smell of the beach could best be described as a cross between a fishmonger’s store as the fresh fish are unloaded and a gas-station’s forecourt. A salty, sea-weedy, petroleum aroma. It wasn’t a good smell that I sucked into my lungs through the afternoon heat. My lungs might be big and strong and I managed an audible laugh on seeing the recreational smokers lighting up along the beach. East Coast Park is one of the few remaining public areas where Singaporeans can smoke yet this week probably wasn’t the smartest place to be waving around naked flames (again, I don’t profess to be an organic-chemist nor do I profess to know the risks of the oil spill, but should I have been told?).
I ran past hundreds of refuse bags along 4km of beach, full of oily sand and debris, lying in the sun on large tarpaulins, ready for collection at some point later in time. Bags of oily rubbish lying in the sun in full view of many children running around on the beach. Does that sound sensible? It was as if nothing had ever happened: cyclists kept cycling, runners kept running, in-line skate first timers still tried to avoid falling and kids kept playing. The park was crowded with people enjoying the weather, flying kites and barbecuing. People were even fishing, idly throwing a line at the ocean opening of the Siglap canal, through a rainbow shimmering film of light crude oil. Seriously? I don’t see much in the way of catch-and-release sport fishing going on here so where were any fish going? Not the barbecue, surely.
I guess the main problem I have is the lack of acknowledgement that anything bad was happening here, or that there was any potential risk to the general public. Yes, I considered any potential risk that I knew of, as a reasonable person (not a chemist) and still went running along the beach, making a concerted effort to run on the track, not the sand. I hope everyone else made the same conscious decision on behalf of themselves and their children. But did they? Should they have had to? Maybe I missed something, but in the space of five days I did not hear one item of news about the spill, did not hear any recommendations about what to do when, IF, you wanted to go to the beach and saw no warning signs at the beach at all.
Clearly there was something out there from the powers that be, but was it enough?
Shovel
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