The Panama-registered cargo ship Morning Sun was grounded 300m off the Taipei County coastline late on Monday evening, releasing more than 100 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into the sea.
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said at a press conference yesterday that as there were no ecologically sensitive areas in the vicinity and that the situation was under control, adding that an emergency response unit had been formed and that most of the leak would be cleaned up within two weeks.
“The accident occurred at 10:20pm on Monday. Due to technical negligence, the bottom of the Morning Sun scraped the rocky seafloor and the ship was left stranded 300m off Taipei’s Shihmen Township (石門),” the administration’s marine pollution section chief Hsu Jen-tse (許仁澤) said.
PHOTO: CHEN CHING-MIN, TAIPEI TIMES
As the oil tank was close to the bottom of the ship, heavy fuel oil was released into the sea, Hsu said, adding that as of 4pm yesterday, about 100 tonnes of the 493 tonnes of heavy oil held in the Morning Sun had leaked out, polluting an area 3km long by 300m wide.
“The leak poses a threat, as it is close to the First Nuclear Power Plant, whose staff has been ordered to activate preventive safety measures,” Hsu said.
Heavy oil is a type of fuel oil made with the remains of crude oil after gasoline and distillate fuel oils are extracted. The viscous and dense liquid fuel is inexpensive, but contains relatively high amounts of pollutants, particularly sulfur, which forms sulfur dioxide upon combustion.
“Fortunately, because of the direction of the northeast seasonal winds, the waves have brought most of the leakage ashore. Otherwise, the heavy oil could have coagulated on the seafloor and it would have been difficult to clean up,” Hsu said.
The incident happened when the 14,000-tonne ship, which was northbound from Singapore to Busan Port in South Korea, pulled close to the Taiwanese coast to shield itself from winds on Monday night. As it was not carrying any load, the poor weather conditions caused it to wobble violently, Hsu said.
Although the Coast Guard Administration received an emergency call, it was unable to land a rescue helicopter on the vessel to rescue crew members until the winds subsided in the morning, Hsu said.
“As of now, 18 of the 21 crew members have been rescued, while the remaining three, who are familiar with the pipelines on the ship, will stay on board to help with the cleanup,” he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS