Wildlife around the coast of North West Australia has been under threat for more than three months now. The owners of the huge Montara Oilfield have failed to plug a leaking oil well. Many marine animals, fish and birds have been destroyed and plants and algae have been killed, which will change the balance of the environment for years to come.
There have now been four attempts at plugging the well head but these have been unsuccessful. An investigation is now being carried out by the Australian Government in an attempt to find out why effective action has not been taken. Apparently the procedure involved consists of plugging the oil leak with a blanket of mud, but this has not been effective so far.
Things have now become considerably worse as three months after the first leak, the gas and oil from the well has caught fire and as well as the marine pollution there is now air pollution too around the area of the East Timor Sea.
The WWF which is the World Wide Fund for Nature is an authority on disasters such as this and says that many sea birds have already died from oil contamination and that the vast oil slick will kill many hundreds more. Observers speak of the carnage involving rare turtles such the hawksbill and dolphins whose bodies are floating around in the oil. Rare sea snakes have also been trapped by the oil slick as there was no way for them to swim out.
This appalling destruction of marine life has even been denied by the oil company involved and their official press releases say that they have found no evidence of harm to any wildlife.
The oil leakage is bad enough, but the chemicals which are used to break up the slick compound the problem and make the marine environment toxic for years to come. The dispersant chemicals that are used on spills like this break down the globules of oil into much smaller drops, and they are dispersed by the currents in the sea. This takes them out over wider areas where they sink down into deep water and can cause serious harm to coral. Fish, birds and marine animals will suffer from the after-effects for two or three generations.
This oil slick is two hundred and fifty kilometers off shore, so its effects were not immediately obvious, but now that the whole thing has caught fire the Australian Government has been forced to step in. Experts fear that this marine environmental disaster will affect the area for many years to come and that it equates to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaskan waters, which still has repercussions twenty years later.
The Prestige, an oil tanker, sank and spilled twenty million gallons of crude oil into the sea around North West Spain, but that was not the end of the story. The ship continued to leak the remaining cargo of oil for days until it was empty. The area affected is important ecologically because of its coral reefs, sharks and birds. Offshore fishing was banned for six months to allow the fish stocks to replenish and the pollution to disperse.
These are just a few examples of the environmental damage done by ships spilling oil into the sea. There are many more examples which go unreported because no one takes any notice of them. Small spillages still add to the damage done by oil to our oceans and the life within them.
So, each time there is one of these disasters where oil is spilled into the sea, experts tell us that they have cleaned up the mess, but the truth is that the oil is still there but it is in smaller droplets and it is sitting on our coral reefs and on areas of the seabed damaging the marine environment where we cannot see it.
