With high seas and strong winds continuing to pound the Aleutian island where a soybean freighter cracked in half, officials could take only a few small steps toward cleaning up the massive oil spill left behind.
Three days after the 225m Selendang Ayu wrecked on the west side of Unalaska Island, Coast Guard officials on Saturday still didn't know how much of the more than 1.5 million liters of thick oil had spilled because they hadn't been able to board either half of the wreck.
The agency's first priority is avoiding more casualties. Six crew members from the ship were lost when a helicopter crashed after lifting them off the vessel Wednesday; four other people were rescued. A search for the missing crew -- five from India and one from the Philippines -- was suspended Friday night.
Captain Ron Morris, the Coast Guard's incident commander, said salvage efforts Saturday were limited to just three missions, including a flight by a Coast Guard helicopter to survey the broken freighter.
A private vessel was to attempt to lay more protective boom in front of streams within Makushin Bay, and a ship hired by the Selendang Ayu's owner was to leave Dutch Harbor, on the other side of Unalaska Island, to bring wildlife experts to the island Sunday to survey and rescue oiled birds.
The Coast Guard had brought in a cutter, the Sycamore, that carries equipment to skim oil in open water. However, oil released so far already has been pushed into surf where contractors will perform the cleanup.
Oil has reached the headlands east of the wreck. Northwest winds also have pushed oil into Skan Bay a few miles north of the wreck. The Coast Guard has unconfirmed reports of a sheen about 16km north of the wreck in the much larger Makushin Bay.
The freighter lost power in its main engine Tuesday. Tugs and Coast Guard cutters were unable to halt its drift to Unalaska Island, where it grounded Wednesday and broke apart.
The ship was carrying 1.6 million liters of heavy bunker oil and about 113,559 liters of fuel. It split in two over the No. 2 tank, which had a capacity of 529,942 liters. Coast Guard officials say that is the oil that apparently flowed out of the ship.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema