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Oil, Oil Everywhere

Oil, Oil Everywhere image
Parent Issue
Day
28
Month
February
Year
1975
OCR Text

An oil tanker rammed a breakwater at Milwaukee last week and produced the second largest oil spill ever on the Great Lakes. A spill some three miles wide and 20 miles long, and still growing has been reported by the Coast Guard. Due to the cold weather the oil thiekens to heavy sludge on top of the water.

Oil spills, oil spills. What may prove to be history's second largest, surpassed only by the 1967 Torrey Canyon disaster, has already gummed up the works along 40 miles of Portugal's coastline, and by all indications will probably spread further.

The Center for Short-Lived Phenomena at the Smithsonian Institue reports that the Danish supertanker Jakob Maersk, 88,000 metric tons dead-weight, struck a sandbar off Portugal and exploded. Straw is being put on the sludge leaking from the ship, but it is not expected to help much. How much more of this can we take?

The Federal Ministry of Transport of Canada is groping for a "secret plan" to find four sunken rail cars filled with deadly liquid chlorine which may be concealed by the shifting sands on the floor of the Strait of Georgia off the coast of Vancouver, Canada.

A transport department official said the search, up to this point, for the tank cars containing 340 tons of chlorine has been unsuccessful. The railcars went down in 600 feet of water north of Vancouver when the barge carrying them overturned.

The pressurized liquid chlorine is potentially lethal if the tanks rupture. The liquid would then turn into gas, rise to the surface and form a huge, deadly cloud similar to that used in the trench warfare during Word War I.