Word: liberians
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Another tanker alarm: one day last week the skipper of the Liberian-registered Harmonic, just arrived in New York harbor with a cargo of 25 million gal. of Libyan crude oil, put in an urgent call to the Coast Guard. Possibly the result of heavy storms encountered at sea, the ship had sprung a small leak, spilling about 300 gal. of oil into the waters of the harbor. That minispill was certainly the least of the tanker accidents that have occurred in U.S. waters since mid-December, but no one could say it would be the last...
Marine Engineers Beneficial Association Leader Jesse Calhoon cited lax Liberian standards for licensing ship captains as one reason for all the tanker problems. In Liberia, he says-with considerable exaggeration-"you could be throwing coconuts out of a tree last week and be the master of a vessel this week...
...disasters began more than two weeks ago, when the Liberian-flag tanker Argo Merchant, well off course, ran hard aground on the Nantucket shoals, a well-charted section of the sea just southeast of Nantucket Island. After a week's battering by wind and waves, the 640-ft. ship began breaking up, spilling its entire cargo into the frigid Atlantic. Immediately endangered were not only the sandy strands of Nantucket and Cape Cod but also the rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank. Shortly after the Argo Merchant grounding, another Liberian ship, the Sansinena, exploded in Los Angeles harbor with...
Heavy Traffic. Last week two more accidents occurred. Another Liberian tanker, the Daphne, ran aground off Puerto Rico and still another, the Olympic Games, grounded and suffered a hull puncture during a docking maneuver at Marcus Hook, Pa. Moving downstream in a slick 32 miles long, its cargo seeped into marshes, coating wintering waterfowl with a sticky layer of oil that matted their feathers and robbed them of their insulating properties. Tens of thousands of birds were endangered...
Fortunately, major accidents involving tankers have been infrequent, but those that do occur are spectacular. The Liberian ship Torrey Canyon spilled over 30 million gal. of oil when it went aground off England's Cornwall coast in 1967. The Metula dumped about 16 million gal. of Persian Gulf crude when it grounded in 1974 in the Strait of Magellan, polluting an area where Charles Darwin had gone ashore more than a century earlier to study animals and plants. The Jacob Maersk lost or burned some 26 million gal. when it exploded off Portugal...