Over 120km of Lebanon’s coastlines have been damaged by oil spills only to recover after 10 years from such massive environmental disaster. Taking in to consideration that the fishing community will be hit for at least two or three years before the ecosystem re-establishes itself, warnings from Marine experts say that the spill could pose a cancer risk to people living in the affected area.Until there is a complete ceasefire no equipments, companies or labor can handle any clean-up operation. The more time wasted to tackle the problem the more time will be required to resolve the issue.The spill caused by Israeli bombing of the Jiyyeh power station killed large quantities of fish along Lebanon’s shores and now over two million inhabitants of Beirut are at risks from “toxic spray”.Yet officials from UNEP still believe that it’s too early to assess the potential environmental and health impact before conducting any sample analysis. Meanwhile, latest satellite images showed the oil slick was continuing to spread across the eastern Mediterranean Sea, threatening the coastlines of Turkey and possibly Cyprus.
Oil spills pose a dangerous ecological hazard to the environment, which are unpredictable and uncontrollable. They are thorough and indiscriminant killers that effect every organism in the impacted area. Oil spill impact, behavior and clean up are dictated by several factors including the type of oil involved and its toxicity, physical factors such as weather and topographical conditions, and availability of equipment and a well prepared spill response plan. The only way to control the impact of oil is to understand these contributing components and to improve current ways of control. Humans create oil spills thus, need to be controlled by humans.
1 response so far ↓
Oil and water can mix after all « Future Vision // September 13, 2006 at 5:43 am
[...] Remeber this past article (http://mznblog.wordpress.com/2006/08/13/damage-is-done/), well researchers at Queen’s University in Canada have found an effective and environmentally friendly way to mix (and unmix) oil and water. This could help the oil industry to clean up oil spills and extract oil from tar sands. The ’surfactant’ (surface active agent) used at Queen’s provides several advantages over current methods. It’s cheap, reversible, and doesn’t require metals, acid, or light. In fact, it can be switched on and off by the respective presence of CO2 or air. But as the researchers don’t give a clue about commercial availability for their ’surfactant,’ I guess there are still some problems to solve. [...]