Oil Spill In China

Last Thursday in Beijing, China another horrible natural disaster occurred. On the country's largest reported oil spill recorded filled the Yellow Sea. The cleanup, temporarily marred by the drowning of a worker this week, his body coated in crude, continued over a 165 square mile stretch of the Yellow Sea off the northeastern city of Dalian, one of China's major ports and strategic oil reserve sites. China National Petroleum Corp. said Thursday that the pipeline that exploded and caused the oil spill last Friday had resumed operations. The blast had reduced oil shipments from part of China's strategic oil reserves to the rest of the country. The cause of the explosion that started the spill was still not clear. The company, Asia's biggest oil & gas producer by volume (doesn't this sound familiar?), also said more than 400 tons of oil had been cleaned up by 9 a.m. yesterday. "Dalian's seafood farming & tourism industries have taken critical hits," Greenpeace China said in a statement. It estimated 10,000 shellfish farms have been contaminated. Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned through the end of August. China Central Television earlier reported an estimate of 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 400,000 gallons, as compared with 94 million to 184 million gallons in the BP oil spill in the gulf of Mexico.