Authorities in the South American nation of Ecuador have confirmed that an oil spill released about 1,200 barrels into the Pacific, contaminating kilometres of oceanfront.
Rafael Armendariz, transportation manager for the state-owned oil firm Petroecuador, confirmed on Thursday that the incident took place a day earlier when a tank in the marine terminal in the port of Esmeraldas surpassed its capacity.
“It is estimated that around 1,200 barrels were spilled,” Armendariz said at a press conference. “Not all of them fell onto the beach. A part was contained by the pool inside of Petroecuador’s facilities.”
About half of the crude spilled out of Petroecuador’s facilities, spreading across about 4km (2.5 miles) of Las Palmas Beach, a popular destination for recreation and tourists.
An investigation into the cause of the spill is taking place. General Manager Ramon Correa said problems like negligence, mechanical damage or sabotage could not yet be ruled out.
Esmeraldas is about 150km (93 miles) south of Ecuador’s northern border with Colombia. The company says it has controlled 90 percent of the spill’s impact on land and 60 percent at sea through initial cleanup efforts.
Environmental Minister Jose Davalos told the TV station Ecuavisa the spill could affect wildlife such as birds and crustaceans. He expected the cleanup to take about a week.
Davalos noted that he is awaiting an assessment from Petroecuador before deciding on appropriate penalties.
Deepwater Horizon oil spill had a total discharge of 4_900_000 barrels = 4.9 MMbbl, 210,000,000 US gal; 780,000 m3
You think we are a failure ? Say that to the dinosaurs : they had millions of years and never built Rockets to prevent asteroids from destroying them. We did it in just a few thousand years.
I think he just meant that we are a failure to our own ideals, for such a smart species we failed to be responsible or keep these companies accountable. Lets say that dinosaurs had millions of years of existence and we achieved more in thousands of years, but wouldn’t it be a shame if our achievements is what led us to our own extinction? Icarus’s fall would be nothing in comparison to ours, and that in itself can be considered a failure.
1,200 barrels is about 2,040 MWh.
4.9 million is 8.3 million MWh.
1 MWh can power a house for about a month or toast 89,000 slices of bread.
Possibly first time in my life I’ve seen someone use _ instead of , in number format.
Decimal_separator (at wikipedia)
I would put a non-breaking space but I don’t know how to write a non-breaking space in Lemmy 😌
I used to work in the oilfield and my reaction was also, oh, only 1200 bbls? That amount is pretty small in terms of the spills we saw or heard about locally regularly, however that was in the middle of North Dakota and this is on a beach and ocean marine life which makes this so much worse.
no, not in North Dakota … :
“Authorities in the South American nation of Ecuador have confirmed …”
Edit : Oups ! Sorry for that. Thanks to @Alto@kbin.social for calling this.
Ok @player2@lemmy.world i think I get it this time :
| Name | enviro. | Nb. barrels | bad ? |
|---|---|---|---|
| D.W.Horizon | at sea | 4.9e6 | 1k x😬 |
| Ecuador | beach | 1.2e3 | 😑 |
| N.Dakota | on land | 1.2e3 | 🙄 |
