Did Coast Guard allow tanker to sail in storm?

As they struggled for ten days to contain the oil spill off Guimaras Island, cleanup crews decently avoided pinning blame for the disaster. The order of the day was to join hands to avert any more damage on marine life and tourist beaches. Slicks had to be sopped up fast or dispersed to sea, and the sunken motorized tanker M/T Solar-I had to be located to plug its leak.

On Wednesday, however, recriminations erupted. Claiming to have pinpointed Solar-I’s location undersea, the Coast Guard harangued Petron Corp., owner of the spilt bunker fuel, for not sending experts to dive in and shut the holes. Of the tanker’s two million liters of cargo, the Coast Guard said, 200,000 liters spewed onto the sea as it sank Aug. 11 a kilometer deep into the muddy bed. From there, it supposedly continued to leak 200-250 liters per hour, with Petron unperturbed.

Petron, on the other hand, went to the press to disclaim responsibility for the cleanup. It brought in consultants from Japan out of the goodness of its heart, it said, but the duty to scoop up the slicks by whatever means was the Coast Guard’s. And from its latest aerial inspections with the National Mapping and Resource Information Authority, there are no new leaks from the area pinpointed by the Coast Guard. At any rate, Petron’s voluntary contributions came in the form of WISE (Waterborne Industry Spill Response) tugboats, oil spill skimmers and booms, absorbent pads, and dispersant chemicals. As for the expected class suit by 10,000 displaced fishermen, Petron added, that’s the problem of Solar-I owner Sunshine Maritime Development Corp. The tanker supposedly is insured with Protection and Indemnity Club, which covers third-party liabilities from maritime accidents.

This early the Coast Guard and Petron appear to be washing their hands of blame for the worst oil spill in Philippine history. They’re doing so ironically just when a special marine board of inquiry is preparing to investigate who and what caused the disaster.

He who cackles laid the egg. And both the Coast Guard and Petron, along with the tanker owner and other parties, must begin to answer questions.

For starters, why was M/T Solar-I navigating in stormy seas on Aug. 11? Did the Coast Guard give it clearance to sail into a typhoon? Only months ago, another tanker ran aground and spilled oil from its punctured hull off Semirara Island near Guimaras – also on a stormy night. How many times before has the Coast Guard allowed this to happen – and for how much?

Was Solar-I seaworthy to begin with? Has the Maritime Industry Authority been on the ball in inspecting the vessel’s hull, emergency equipment, and crew capability?

And why did Petron lease a single-hull tanker like Solar-I, when the industry norm is to use unsinkable double-hull vessels? Petron is 45 percent owned by Saudi Aramco, 10 percent by small players, and 45 percent by the Philippine government. That last ownership item opens it to magic tricks in public biddings, as in equipment leases. Did the decision makers at Petron favor Solar-I for the usual under-the-table considerations?

Will we ever get answers to these basic queries? Unlikely – with the composition of the board of inquiry. Its members are officers no less of the Coast Guard, Marina and, oh, the Professional Regulatory Commission which recently was slow to act on another leak – the one that involved questionnaires for the nursing board exams.

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Free competition accords consumers better services at cheaper rates. This tenet of "more for less" is clearest in telecoms. With three giant cellular phone networks nationwide, for instance, users easily can subscribe to the one most reliable – with freebies to boot. It wasn’t always like that, though. Metro Manilans recall when only PLDT provided landlines, and thus never knew what open market meant. Only when Globe and Bayantel came in the ’90s did consumers get to choose which one could install the fastest, charge the least, and branch out into products like caller ID or wired DSL.

Techno-savvy or not, executives and residents at Subic Freeport do not want to return to an old Manila situation. Eagerly awaited by them is a decision on the entry of a second landline operator after a dozen years with a monopoly. That will depend on the outcome of protests by PLDT affiliate Subic Telecoms Inc. against the launching of Globe subsidiary Innove.

Subic is an economic free zone, but SubicTel ironically claims a lock-in on all landline services. That’s by virtue of a 1994 partnership with AT&T and Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority to develop within ten years a state-of-the art telecoms system. Before the ten years lapsed, AT&T and SBMA sold out to PLDT, which became the sole owner of SubicTel. On the tenth year SBMA decided to open up the telecoms market like in all other zones. Globe’s Innove won the bid as a player with track record but best franchise fee to SBMA. Resisting, SubicTel cried it held three five-year rights to extend its exclusive service. To that, the Government Corporate Counsel replied that the right pertained solely to SBMA not going into competition against SubicTel.

Peripheral issues have arisen. SubicTel is questioning the authority of SBMA, which granted it ten-year exclusivity in 1994, to award a franchise to Innove this time around. It says the National Telecoms Commission has the sole power to grant permits, to which Innove retorts that it does have such an NTC permit to operate anywhere.

At the core of the to-do, however, is a constitutional question. Article XII (National Economy and Patrimony), Section 11 forbids in the first place the exclusivity of any franchise or other form of authorization.

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