Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...OIL NOTES by Rick Bass; Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence...
...hard on automobiles. After he steered one company car into shallow water, the boss sent him a 20-ft. length of chain for Christmas. Bass acknowledges his clumsiness: "Sometimes I feel almost out of control." But he glories in a rare natural gift: "I know how to find oil...
...that are most frequently used suffer some basic flaws: they do not work in rough seas, and heavy crude tends to seep under a boom and clog a skimmer. Finally, the devices are all but useless when confronted with a devastatingly large spill like the Valdez disaster. Once the oil had spread over the vast Prince William Sound, a boat towing a skimmer needed fully 14 hours to clear one narrow swath across the 35-mile-wide bay. The chemical dispersants often used in oil cleanups have problems too. They cannot function in calm water, and because they are toxic...
Such statistics have persuaded many people that some territories should be placed off limits to oil-field development. Last week the House Appropriations Committee voted to enact a yearlong ban on drilling off vast areas of the coasts of California and Florida, a 50-mile stretch of the mid-Atlantic and part of New England. Congress has never before urged so sweeping a ban on offshore exploration. The committee also voted for a year's moratorium on oil and gas exploration in Alaska's Bristol Bay, an exceedingly rich fishing area...
That strategy, however, has a catch. If the U.S were to develop new domestic sources of oil, the country could reduce its dependence on foreign tankers in its harbors. Last year foreign producers provided the U.S. with 37% of its oil supplies, up from 27% in 1985. Since foreign oil enters the country mostly by tanker, growing imports only increase the odds of new spills. According to projections by Ohio Democrat Mary Oakar, chairwoman of the House Economic Stabilization Subcommittee, by the end of the 1990s as much as 90% of the oil consumed in the U.S. could arrive...