Oil spill threatens Visayan Sea; DENR-7 starts to contain inflow

The Guimaras oil spill is now threatening the Visayan Sea, but regional director Celso Loriega, of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said steps were already started to contain the impending inflow of oil to this northernmost part of Cebu.

The Cebu-based Coast Guard-Central Eastern Visayas District said its Marine Environmental Protection Unit has been dispatched already to help in the oil containment operations off Nueva Valencia town in Guimaras.

The Mepu members brought with them containment devices and items, including 10 segments of an oil spill boom, 10 drums of oil dispersant and a rubber boat. Tsuneishi Shipyard donated the oil dispersant to aid and fast track the cleanup in Guimaras.

A fishermen's group, for its part, also called on the government to include Cebu a part of the declared calamity area, asked to make Petron and the shipping firm liable for the damage, and rallied the affected people to join hands in protecting the area.

Fisherfolk Development Center Inc., said it is only a matter of days before the oil spill outflow will reach the northern waters of Cebu, and the government should now put the province under a calamity area at this time.

Vince Cinches, executive director of FIDEC Inc., said communities around the threatened areas should now organize and act to protect their livelihood. "The Cebuano community should act together...to stop the oil from reaching our waters," he said.

"Relief operations must continue to help the people of Guimaras. Petron must also compensate villages for loss of their livelihood, and set up plans to give...long-term livelihoods. Instead of making the people in the community janitors for the oil spill," FIDEC said in a statement.

Cinches said his group has demanded Petron to take the sunken tanker immediately out of the seabed or pump out the remaining oil from the ship's tanks. "Unless this is quickly dealt with, there looms the prospect of a bigger catastrophe," he said.

The national government "has taken a feeble approach in responding to the disaster and holding the liable parties responsible for the environmental and economic damages their recklessness has caused," he said.

FIDEC said Petron, Maritime Development Corporation and some government agencies should be made accountable for this biggest oil spill in the country ever-the damage of which on the marine life would linger through decades.

Cinches had assailed the government for its confession that it has neither the right machinery nor the resources to probe the cause of the oil spill. It is both a disappointment and a tragedy that the country, which has the fourth longest coastline in the world, is ill equipped in handling this king of calamity, he said.

Last August 11, Petron chartered the M/V Solar I to transport 2.4 million liters of oil to the southern island of Mindanao when the tanker sank on the unusually rough waters off Guimaras Island, and discharged large volume of industrial oil unto the seas.

So far 200,000 liters of oil have leaked from the tanker, contaminating a 24 square kilometer marine area with the oil slick contaminating over 300 kilometers of coastline on Guimaras and threatening Negros and Panay Island.

The spill is already regarded as the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Philippines, stretching more than 10 nautical miles and affecting thousands of poor fishermen, and even the tourism industry in that part of the country. - Wenna A. Berondo and Jasmin R. Uy/RAE