I started the day reading through a news report off the Internet about the size and scale of the oil spill by a British Petroleum leased-rig named Deep-water Horizon off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.
In that story, the reporter mentioned that the spill has now earned the distinction of being the worst oil spill in the history of the US and that it has already surpassed the damage wrecked by the Exxon Valdez tanker in 1989 that spilled out 11 million gallons of oil off Prince William Sound in Alaska.

It also reminded me of the Guimaras Oil Spill tragedy that happened on August 11, 2006 as MT Solar 1, chartered by Petron Corporation, sank in a storm laden with 2.1 million liters of bunker fuel oil.

In reviewing the paragraph above, one would immediately notice that it is difficult to appreciate the relative scale of these disasters just by reading off the numbers. How do you compare the two tanker spills to the Deepwater Horizon disaster?

We can first compare the volume of oil that has been spilled. A distinction has to be made first with the numbers that were mentioned above. The BP oil spill report mentions the rate at which the oil is pumping out from the well while the other two spills is quoting the total amount of oil that has been spilled out.

Unlike both the Guimaras and the Exxon Valdez tragedies, the Gulf of Mexico spill is due to a wellhead blowout on an oil rig while it is tapped into an underwater well. The tanker tragedies held a finite capacity of oil while the BP spill has the capacity to continue pumping out oil if it is not successfully capped.
Attempts to fully stem the leak has fallen below targets according to US government estimates. There have also been differing reports as to the flow rates of the Gulf disaster from 35,000 to 60,000 barrels of oil per day.

Sixty thousand barrels per day would amount to 9.5 million liters of oil per day—nearly five times more than the Guimaras oil spill. As for the Exxon Valdez spill, eleven million gallons would be around 41.6 million in liters. In a just week, the Gulf spill has overtaken the Exxon Valdez tragedy in volume. Even the lower bound of the flow rate would still produce staggering numbers: 35,000 barrels per day is 4.1 million liters (twice the Guimaras oil spill and one tenth of the Exxon Valdez tragedy in just a day).

The amount of oil alone would have given preview to the environmental and economic dislocation the spill would cause. The area affected would be large as the spill is occurring more than 1.5 kilometers under water and produces a wide plume from the sea bottom. Tar balls have already reached as far as Texas beaches this week and simulations point out that existing water currents can bring the oil to the Atlantic Ocean.

In the Guimaras oil spill, mangroves, seagrass, mollusks and fish populations were observed to fall several years after the event. Around 54 communities in Gui-maras, Iloilo and Negros Occi-dental have been threatened by the spill. Among these, some 20 communities in four municipalities in Guimaras were directly affected. The decline in fish catch has aggravated the already hard economic situation of farmers and fisherfolk in the island.

The images of the Exxon Valdez spill was one of oil drenched birds and black coastlines amid the snow n Alaska. The environmental disaster was graphic. One can only imagine the scale at which the shrimp, crab and fish catchers in the Gulf of Mexico will be affected. The communities that were battered by Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana are now also going to be directly affected by the BP spill. The US government should be doing its best to address the livelihood and economic concerns of those vulnerable to the oil spill.

Here in the Philippines, 28 million hectares of our territory is now covered by 69 petroleum service contracts issued by the Department of Energy as of 2009. This includes 21 million hectares of critical biodiversity-rich seascapes and marine areas in the Visayan Sea, Bohol Sea, Panay Gulf, Sulu Sea and the Palawan Passage.

We ask the new DOE secretary to review these service contracts. We should ask what safeguards or precautions do we have to prevent disasters in these offshore rigs that we allow in our seas and what programs are in place to rehabilitate those affected by previous spills. We should take into account the vulnerability of the fisherfolk and coastal communities that will be affected by offshore drilling for it will be them that will be in the front-line during disasters.