The Disaster That Wasn't

A couple of weeks ago a smallish ship ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef sparking the usual apocalyptic predictions. The vessel was carrying coal so the big fear was the amount of oil being carried as fuel.

The biggest oil spill baddie of course was the Exxon Valdez an oil tanker which ran aground in Alaska, unleashing huge amounts of oil. A report published last week showed that despite all claims to the contrary, the environment has recovered and that the only casualties were a few individual creatures.

Andrew Bolt has just published this on his blog as commentary on the Shen Neng 1:

Walter Starck joins me in amazement at the hyped-up claims by politicans and activists that just three or four tonnes of oil from the grounded Chinese Shen Neng 1 may devastate the Great Barrier Reef:

- Oil floats, coral doesn’t. The damage to reefs from oil spills is minimal and recovery is rapid. Follow-up studies of oil spills have repeatedly found that environmental recovery has invariably been much faster and more complete than predicted with the worst affects being inflicted by clean-up efforts. The use of dispersants, as was done in the current event, is only a PR stunt by government wanting to be seen to be doing something. For the reef, it is the worst thing to do.

- In the First Persian Gulf War in 1991, the largest oil spill ever occurred when 6-8 million tonnes was dumped into an area of shallow water and reefs. With a thousand oil well fires to contend with, no effort was made to do anything about the marine spill. Follow-up studies found that within 4 months most of the oil had been degraded naturally and within 4 years even the most heavily affected areas had largely or completely recovered. This spill was about 10,000 times larger than the total carried by the ship now on the reef.