Tanker Accidents Research Articles

Oil Spills: Law on Liability with Special Reference to the Indian Regime

Oil is not only the most sought after but also the most transported commodity worldwide and because of its physical and chemical nature, sea is the most convenient medium of transportation. Oil pollution is a recurring phenomenon and has gravest effects on marine environment as well as economic conditions of the people inhabiting the areas around the affected areas. Oil pollution of the sea began with the introduction of oil fuel in ships and increased with the carriage of oil cargo in bulk and has been ever increasing ever since. Oil pollution might result from collision of vessels carrying oil cargo or from its bunkers. Tanker accidents, however, are not the only source of oil pollution. Marine based oil pollution can emanate either from ships or from offshore installations.Pictures of the Deep Water Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico and MSC Chitra and MV Khalijia 3 collision in the Arabian Sea splashed across the print and television media educe the latent potential of environmental calamity a marine accident might cause. Accidental pollution of sea by oil is inevitable. It is the price that mankind has to pay for the benefits of an industrial society. Now the big question arises as to who is to be held liable for accidents that lead to such catastrophic effects on the marine environment?States either enter into regional as well as international instruments or depend on common law principles or statutory laws to tackle the menace of oil pollution. Fourteen international conventions and protocols provide a framework for international co-operation to combat emergency situations threatening the marine environment. The international order is principally concerned with the avoidance of accidents at sea, and with regulation of the operational discharge of oil in the cleaning of ballast tanks of oil tankers. Civil liability for oil pollution has been the subject of international conventions for decades.The law of oil spill liability is a mixture of civil liability and criminal regimes in certain jurisdictions like U.S. The liability and fund conventions limit the liability of the ship-owner in case of maritime accident causing oil pollution. Principles governing the law on oil spill liability are strict liability, channeling of liability, and caps on liability limit. The issue arises as to the propriety of capping the liability limits in the cases of oil spill where the implications of one incident are immense, costs involved in the cleanup are massive and the damage caused to the natural resources and private parties is also grave. India which has a vast coastline is susceptible to pollution by maritime oil spill accidents and in the wake of recent incidents it has become imperative to analyze the Indian scheme of laws governing oil spills and see whether it is appropriate enough to meet the challenges of claims arisen by such an incident. The paper seeks to analyze the international liability regime in case of marine based oil pollution and the status of Indian laws in dealing with accidental oil spills.

Analysis of tanker casualties after the Oil Pollution Act (USA, 1990)

A prime concern of maritime transport is to enhance ship safety and to reduce marine pollution related to ship incidents and accidents. Since the elimination of marine accidents is practically unrealistic, a reasonable target for the maritime industry and relevant regulatory bodies is the mitigation of accidents in terms of minimization of the probability of occurrence and of the associated consequences. The present study focuses on a comprehensive analysis of recorded accidents on medium and large oil tankers (deadweight over 20,000 t), which occurred after the introduction of the Oil Pollution Act (USA, 1990) up to the present. Raw casualty data were reviewed and re-analysed in order to produce appropriate statistics useful for the implementation of risk-based assessment methodologies. The main outcome of this particular study is the identification of the significant qualitative historical trends of tanker accidents and of the quantitative characteristics of particular tanker accidents, such as the overall frequencies of accidents per ship year, the frequency of each major accident category and per tanker ship size, the ship types or designs and ages, the degrees of severity of accidents and the tonnes of oil spilled per ship year.

Numerical Modelling of Oil Spills in the Area of Kvarner and Rijeka Bay (The Northern Adriatic Sea)

Several hypothetical cases of oil spills from tankers in the Kvarner and Rijeka Bay were analyzed using three‐dimensional circulation models coupled with oil spill model. Two circulation models—local one covering the area of Kvarner Bay, Rijeka Bay, and Vinodol channel along with the basin‐wide one covering the whole Adriatic Sea—are connected through the one‐way nesting procedure by imposing the results from the Adriatic model to the open boundaries of the local one. Oil spill model relays on the current fields obtained by the local circulation model during all our simulations. Spreading of the oil pollution from three hypothetical positions of tanker accidents in the local model domain was simulated for the periods of 10 “winter‐season” and “summer‐season” days. The oil spill model results show that the hypothetical tanker accidents in the center of the Rijeka Bay are the most dangerous for the studied area in both seasons. Summer‐season case shows significantly worse situation from the ecological point of view, oil spills spread on the larger area simply because stratification and mixing present during the winter period reduce oil slick effect.

Estimating the economic impacts of maritime port development: The case of A Coruña, Spain

In recent years, we have seen an increasing number of port megaprojects in Spain (Ferrol, Gijón, Pasaia, Tenerife) justified, among other reasons, by the need for increasing storage and transport capacity, the location of container logistic centres on major shipping routes, or the need to have refuge harbours to avoid oil tanker accidents in case of bad sea conditions. The development of the megaproject for the A Coruña Outer Port in Galicia (northwest of Spain) is very controversial due to its major impacts on nearby fishing, and seafood banks affecting fishing and shellfish activities. We propose a methodology to assess these impacts on multi-species and multi-gear traditional fisheries. The analysis includes the impacts on over fifty fish and shellfish species (e.g. sand sole, European squid, spinous spider crab, common cuttlefish, European pilchard, pouting, gilthead sea bream, octopus, goose barnacle and seaweeds). Stakeholders’ knowledge (e.g. administration, professionals, fishermen) was used to assign non-spatial commercial data (landings) to the corresponding gears employed and fishing grounds affected by the port development. Our results show that the short-term economic losses are between 2.6 and 3 million Euros (2005 prices) and are mainly related to inshore fishing activities. Our results served as a frame of reference for negotiations between representatives of the A Coruña fishermen’s guild and the Port Authority.

Study on Quantitative Risk Assessment of LGP Transportation in Road Tunnel

Based on the tunnel environment and the characteristic of flammability and explosion of liquefied petroleum gas (LGP), the leak of LPG tanker can induce heavy casualties and property loss in the tunnel. In order to study quantitative risk of LGP transportation in road tunnel, the data of 599 accidents and 659 accidental vehicles are collected. From these data, the proportion of LGP tanker accident in the total accident vehicles and million vehicles kilometer (MVK) tanker accident rates are obtained. By analyzing the leakage scene of LGP tanker, the possible accident types of the LGP transportation were analyzed, such as boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE), vapor cloud explosion (VCE), flash fire and jet fire, etc. The impact of leak time to various ranges of injury is studied in the condition of LGP continued leakage. The slight injury, serious injury and death radius of LGP leakage accidents are calculated in tanker loaded with different LGP quantity. In view of the accidental analysis, the countermeasures will be proposed to reduce the risk of LGP transportation in road tunnel.

Ｔｒｉｐｌｅ−Ｉ に基づく原油タンカーの包括的環境影響評価指標の開発

In recent years, the necessity of risk assessment is rising in various study fields and in the industry. It is the same in the maritime field. The environmental risk assessment is especially important because the damage for marine environment is serious once the accident of the oil tanker occurs. However the environmental risk assessment is more complex than the safety risk assessment because many things must be considered. The study of the method for assessing the pollution by oil spill from tankers has st arted in IMO, the volume of spilled oil was adopted as its basic index. On the other hand, Inclusive Impact Index (Triple I) has been proposed by the IMPACT Research Committee in The Japan Society of Naval Architects and Ocean Engineers. Triple-I is defined and calculated based on the ecological footprint, ecological risk, human risk, cost, and benefit. By using this index, we can objectively discuss the societal importance of the risk control option from both environmental and economical viewpoints. In this paper we try to apply Triple-I to the environmental risk assessment in the maritime field, and evaluate the risk of the oil tanker and disuss whether Triple-I can be used for the cost effectiveness assessment.

Oil Spills in Coastal Zones: Predicting Slick Transport and Weathering Processes

This paper presents some considerations about environmental consequences of the spills and also about oil spill detection and control. Afterwards, it presents a computational structure that has been developed to forecast the time-space evolution of oil spills in marine environments. This structure was developed based on widely used mathematical formula- tions for oil spreading and weathering processes. It uses depth-averaged currents obtained from a two-dimensional and/or a quasi-three-dimensional hydrodynamic model, and net wave velocities obtained analytically. A Lagrangian transport model or, alternatively, a Eulerian transport model is used to predict the oil slick transport and spread. General character- istics of the computational structure and the results of its application to two real case studies - the Cercal accident on October 1994, and the New World tanker accident on December 1994 - are presented. Comparisons of numerical results with measured data are shown and a brief discussion about the computational structure performance is also presented.

Global Aspects and Health Effects of Oil Tanker Accidents

Global Aspects and Health Effects of Oil Tanker Accidents

Compensation for pollution damage caused by oil tanker accidents: from “Erika” to “Prestige”

The international legal regime for compensation of oil pollution damage works quite efficiently in case of minor oil spills provoked by tankers. However, the accidents of “Erika” and “Prestige” disclose the serious implementation gaps affecting the international civil liability regime when applied to major marine casualties producing extensive pollution damage. In such cases, the ceilings for compensation are manifestly too low and most of the pollution damage provoked is not remedied, especially damage to the environment per se. Recent developments by national and European Courts relating to the “Erika” accident have made progress towards a more comprehensive compensation of pollution damage. But, in the case of “Prestige”, the United States Courts have taken a more conservative stand with respect to actions brought by Spain against the Classification Society American Bureau of Shipping.

Effect of a simulated oil spill on natural assemblages of marine phytoplankton enclosed in microcosms

Two microcosm experiments were carried out to simulate the effect of sporadic oil spills derived from tanker accidents on oceanic and coastal marine phytoplankton assemblages. Treatments were designed to reproduce the spill from the Prestige, which took place in Galician coastal waters (NW Iberia) in November 2002. Two different concentrations of the water soluble fraction of oil were used: low (8.6 ± 0.7 μg l −1 of chrysene equivalents) and high (23 ± 5 μg l −1 of chrysene equivalents l −1). Photosynthetic activity and chlorophyll a concentration decreased in both assemblages after 24–72 h of exposure to the two oil concentrations, even though the effect was more severe on the oceanic assemblage. These variables progressively recovered up to values close or higher than those in the controls, but the short-term negative effect of oil, which was generally stronger at the high concentration, also induced changes in the structure of the plankton community. While the biomass of nanoflagellates increased in both assemblages, oceanic picophytoplankton was drastically reduced by the addition of oil. Effects on diatoms were also observed, particularly in the coastal assemblage. The response of coastal diatoms to oil addition showed a clear dependence on size. Small diatoms (<20 μm) were apparently stimulated by oil, whereas diatoms >20 μm were only negatively affected by the high oil concentration. These differences, which could be partially due to indirect trophic interactions, might also be related to different sensitivity of species to PAHs. These results, in agreement with previous observations, additionally show that the negative effect of the water soluble fraction of oil on oceanic phytoplankton was stronger than on coastal phytoplankton.

Cardiovascular function and plasma lipid profiles in rats exposed to petroleum products and water contaminated with hydrocarbons

Diffuse and chronic exposure to petroleum products and contamination is increasing both in the rural areas and urban areas especially with increased use of petroleum products for power generation in domestic and industrial environment. Acute exposure also occurs following spillages, blowouts, and pipeline vandalisation and tanker accidents. This study therefore investigated the effects of diesel, kerosene, petrol and their water soluble fractions on cardiovascular function and lipid profile and organ weights in experimental animals.Contaminated water and petroleum products were administered via the oral route to various groups of Sprague Dawley rats for three weeks. The rats were anaesthetised and cannulated for recording blood pressure and heart rate while samples of blood were taken from the venous catheter for plasma lipid profiling.The results showed that while most petroleum products had no significant effect on systolic blood pressure, the diesel‐water fraction (WSFD) lowered systolic blood pressure (80 ±10.6mmHg vs. 120±4.9mmHg), increased pulse pressure and heart rate (p&lt;0.05). Diastolic pressure was reduced by most fractions (p&lt;0.05). It was also observed that total cholesterol, HDL‐ cholesterol, and LDL cholesterol where lowered while plasma triglycerides increased. The organ weight index was increased. These results suggest that acute exposure to these petroleum products and their water soluble components may affect aspects of cardiovascular function and other organs of the body.This work was supported by University of Lagos, Postgraduate intramural fund.

Large-scale fuel deposition patterns on northern Spanish shores following the ‘Prestige’ oil spill

Following the accident of the oil tanker ‘Prestige’, we surveyed the large scale fuel deposition patterns on the Cantabrian shore (northern Spain) covering three regions (from west to east): (i) Asturias, west of Cape Peñas (24 segments surveyed); (ii) Asturias, east of Cape Peñas (33 segments surveyed); and (iii) Cantabria (also east of Cape Peñas, 256 segments surveyed). Fuel arrived to the Cantabrian Coast as a single oil wave which was more intense to the east than to the west of Cape Peñas. The mean percentage of coast length affected was 25, 41 and 15% in western Asturias, eastern Asturias and Cantabria, respectively. However, less than 10% of the substrate was covered by fuel in oiled patches, thus the impact was moderate. We conclude that these patterns are consistent with fuel transport by the Iberian Poleward Current, a hydrographic feature typical of this region during winter.

OIL SPILL SIMULATIONS IN THE AFTERMATH OF TANKER ACCIDENT AT THE TANKER ROUTES IN THE MARMARA SEA

ABSTRACT Marmara is a small inland sea in Turkey, connected to the Black Sea by the Istanbul Strait (Bosporus) and to the Aegean Sea by the Canakkale Strait (Dardanelles), separating the continents of Europe and Asia; area 11,140 square km/4,300 square mi. In parts it reaches depths of over 1,200 m/3,936 ft. International importance of the Sea of Marmara stands in the forefront even though it is an inland sea of Turkey and it deals with increasing ecological problems for the last 50 years. The Pollution in the Sea of Marmara which threatens all living species cause dramatic falling in fishing potential. Increase in the volume of maritime traffic on the Strait and the Sea of Marmara have increased the risk of the maritime accidents over the years and since 1948 the number of ship accidents have been recorded as around 700. Furthermore, being on the transportation way of hazardous and dangerous materials, pose environmental and safety hazards for the Bosphorus Strait and the Marmara Sea with the surrounding residential areas. The increasing sea traffic also causes considerable congestion on the northern entrance of the Bosphorus Strait. Increase in the volume of maritime traffic on the Bosphorus and Marmara Sea heightens the risk of maritime accidents. In the present work, the risky region of Marmara Sea is chosen for simulation studies. It is assumed that 1000 tonnes of medium crude oil is spilled in the aftermath of a tanker accident. The distribution of oil spill is then determined with respect to time and space by considering 2 different wind directions and scale. The simulation code GNOME™ version 1.2.7 is utilized to generate the oil spill scenarios. As a result of these runs, spillage areas were identified as risky areas and necessary actions to minimize the effect of spill were discussed in the Marmara Sea.

Casualty analysis of large tankers

This article presents detailed results of a comprehensive analysis of recorded accidents of large oil tankers (deadweight greater than 80 000 tonnes) occurring between 1978 and 2003. The analysis encompasses a thorough review of available raw accident data and their postprocessing in a way to produce appropriate statistics useful for the implementation of risk-based assessment methodologies. The processing of the captured data led to the identification of significant qualitative historical trends of tanker accidents and of quantitative characteristics of large tanker accidents, such as overall accident rates per ship-year. Data were also analyzed for all major accident categories separately, taking into account tanker ship size/type, the degree of accident severity, and the oil spill tonne rates per ship-year; this led to the identification of heavily polluted worldwide geographical areas as a result of large tanker accidents.

MODEL FOR PROBABILISTIC ASSESSMENT OF OIL OUTFLOW EVENT CAUSED BY TANKER ACCIDENT

Model proposed in this paper can be used to predict oil outflow event, caused by the tanker accident, probability distribution in different sectors of navigation area. The use of expert judgment techniques to obtain necessary data for application of the model ensures that all relevant available information (world and regional marine accident statistics, factors inherent to navigational area in question) will be duly taken into account. Model is designed for the Lithuanian responsibility sea area; the assessment of probability of oil outflow event and its distribution in different sectors of the area is performed.

Cost-effectiveness criteria for marine oil spill preventive measures

Oil tanker accidents resulting in large quantities of oil spills and severe pollution have occurred in the past, leading to major public attention and an international focus on finding solutions for minimising the risks related to such events. This paper proposes a novel approach for evaluating measures for prevention and control of marine oil spills, based on considerations of oil spill risk and cost effectiveness. A cost model that incorporates all costs of a shipping accident has been established and oil tanker spill accidents have been further elaborated as a special case of such accidents. Utilising this model, novel implementation criteria, in terms of the Cost of Averting a Tonne of oil Spilt (CATS), for risk control options aiming at mitigating the environmental risk of accidental oil spills, are proposed. The paper presents a review of previous studies on the costs associated with oil spills from shipping, which is a function of many factors such as location of spill, spill amount, type of oil, etc. However, ships are designed for global trade, transporting different oil qualities. Therefore, globally applicable criteria must average over most of these factors, and the spill amount is the remaining factor that will be used to measure cost effectiveness against. A weighted, global average cleanup cost of USD 16,000/tonne of oil spilt has been calculated, considering the distribution of oil tanker traffic densities. Finally, the criteria are compared with some existing regulations for oil spill prevention, response and compensation (OPA 90).

Casualty analysis of Aframax tankers

The paper presents detailed results of a comprehensive analysis pertaining to Aframax tanker incidents and accidents that occurred in the last 26 years. The thorough review of the captured accident database information and the analysis of the historical records provided essential qualitative and quantitative information on a variety of parameters relevant to risk-based methodologies, namely the degree of severity and frequencies of accidents broken down into the pre-1990 and post-1990 periods, the spilled tonne rates and the impact of hull design and of ship's age, particularly on non-accidental structural failure accidents and geography of worldwide oil spills. The generated information enables conclusions on Aframax tanker accidents and of tankers in general to be drawn, for further exploitation in risk based design, operation and regulations.

Shipping Safety and Oil Spill Response in Ice-covered Waters

With the increasing demands for energy resources, hydrocarbon development is expanding its field to what is called frontiers, including ice-covered waters. Surface transportation by tankers in ice plays an important role as a major transportation mode of the developed resources to and from the refmery and/or to the market. On the other hand, ice-covered waters are known to be vulnerable to pollution. Large oil spilling by a tanker accident could cause irretrievable damage to the environment. Oil spilling response in ice, however, requires totally different technologies from those in open water conditions. For the sustainable development of resources in ice-covered waters it is indispensable to secure shipping safety and prepare a proper response system against pollution due to oil spilling.

A partially coupled, fraction-by-fraction modelling approach to the subsurface migration of gasoline spills

The subsurface spreading behaviour of gasoline, as well as several other common soil- and groundwater pollutants (e.g. diesel, creosote), is complicated by the fact that it is a mixture of hundreds of different constituents, behaving differently with respect to e.g. dissolution, volatilisation, adsorption and biodegradation. Especially for scenarios where the non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) phase is highly mobile, such as for sudden spills in connection with accidents, it is necessary to simultaneously analyse the migration of the NAPL and its individual components in order to assess risks and environmental impacts. Although a few fully coupled, multi-phase, multi-constituent models exist, such models are highly complex and may be time consuming to use. A new, somewhat simplified methodology for modelling the subsurface migration of gasoline while taking its multi-constituent nature into account is therefore introduced here. Constituents with similar properties are grouped together into eight fractions. The migration of each fraction in the aqueous and gaseous phases as well as adsorption is modelled separately using a single-constituent multi-phase flow model, while the movement of the free-phase gasoline is essentially the same for all fractions. The modelling is done stepwise to allow updating of the free-phase gasoline composition at certain time intervals. The output is the concentration of the eight different fractions in the aqueous, gaseous, free gasoline and solid phases with time. The approach is evaluated by comparing it to a fully coupled multi-phase, multi-constituent numerical simulator in the modelling of a typical accident-type spill scenario, based on a tanker accident in northern Sweden. Here the PCFF method produces results similar to those of the more sophisticated, fully coupled model. The benefit of the method is that it is easy to use and can be applied to any single-constituent multi-phase numerical simulator, which in turn may have different strengths in incorporating various processes. The results demonstrate that the different fractions have significantly different migration behaviours and although the methodology involves some simplifications, it is a considerable improvement compared to modelling the gasoline constituents completely individually or as one single mixture.

Use of ASAR images to study the evolution of the Prestige oil spill off the Galician coast

Space‐borne synthetic aperture radar has been proven to be a useful tool for ocean oil spill monitoring due to its large coverage, independence of the day–night cycle and all‐weather capability. In this paper, a method for oil spill detection based on a visual interpretation was applied to two consecutive Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) images acquired during the Prestige oil spill off the Spanish coast. The obtained oil spill information was integrated into a Geographical Information System (GIS) database in order to study the spatial distribution and the evolution of the slicks between both days, in addition to carrying out a comparison with field observations. The results show the great capability of monitoring and forecasting marine oil spills caused by large oil tanker accidents by means of the use of radar imagery jointly with other information, such as wind data or in situ observations.