Oil spill off Pakistan worse than first thought

This is very bad news. So thats why the govt. had stopped issuing empty statements in the last 2 days as I had written “before”:http://ko.offroadpakistan.com/pakistan/2003_08/day_9_navy_ship_resumes_oil_salvage_from_tasman_spirit.html. I wish the Pakistani news sites would also follow this as fast as the foreign news services seem to be. So far, places like Radio Australia, the BBC, Japanese news site, Malaysian, you name it, they all have faster updates on the whole sordid mess. Not once since the oil spill happened have I come across a Pakistani news source which was covering this as fast as the foreign ones, and I’ve been checking daily.

It seems almost like the local newspapers just repeat whatever the “AP”:http://www.nytimes.com/pages/aponline/news/ and “Reuters”:http://www.reuters.com wire sends them. In the last 15 days there hasn’t been a single piece of actual reporting done by any of the local newspapers. Repeating what Brigadier X and Vice Admiral Y said is *not* reporting. There have been a lot of articles written by the usual lot about the whole diasaster, castigating the govt. and so on, but sitting at a desk somewhere writing an article isn’t what reporting is about. Journalism is well and good, but it has to be based on the groundwork established by reporting.

Where are the facts? What investigations if any have are underway? The govt. is not going to hang it’s own out to dry. Unless people make a fuss the brigadiers and admirals are just going to quietly fade away to their 10 plots in retirement heaven and leave the whole mess to someone else.

bq.. A devastating oil spill off Pakistan’s southern coast is much worse than originally thought.

And port authorities fear the broken tanker responsible could crack and leak further.

A senior official with the Karachi Port Trust, Brigadier Iftikhar Arshad told newsagency AFP rough estimates now put the total oil spillage from the ship at *24,000 tonnes*, compared to earlier estimates of 15,000 tonnes.

>> “GoAsia Breaking News”:http://www.goasiapacific.com/news/GoAsiaPacificBNA_934442.htm

p. *Update:* The KPT “fears more spillage from oil tanker”:http://www.jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2003-daily/29-08-2003/main/main13.htm.

*Update:* While the “Tasman Spirit might sink”:http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_30-8-2003_pg7_9, It seems they’ve gotten almost all the oil out, and will “finish tonight”:http://www.dawn.com/2003/08/30/local1.htm. The WHO has “declared the incident as an environment catastrophe of massive proportions having hazardous health impact”:http://www.dawn.com/2003/08/30/top9.htm.

*Update:* The BBC says that the “Karachi oil spill is critical”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3195055.stm, “Reuters says the ship is going to spill more”:http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/ISL273897.htm, and Ardeshire Cowasjee has written a “third article on the Tasman Spirit”:http://www.dawn.com/weekly/cowas/cowas.htm.

*Update:* Finally, almost all the “oil has been removed”:http://www.paknews.com/main.php?id=1&date1=2003-09-01 from the Tasman Spirit and the “agencies are set to launch a major beach cleaning drive”:http://www.dawn.com/2003/09/01/local1.htm. Some estimates place the oil spilled at 30,000 tons, up from the last figure of 26,000 tons.

*Update:* “Pakistan completes extraction of oil from tanker that ran aground”:http://famulus.msnbc.com/FamulusIntl/ap09-01-114330.asp?reg=ASIA.

4 thoughts on “Oil spill off Pakistan worse than first thought”

  1. At the end of the day, incompetence rules out the otherwise well-intentioned persons. So even if the government wants to stay innocent, the loss inflicted upon the nation surmounts their idiocities. The media, of course, in Pakistan, is what culturally our governments have evolved into. We can no longer blame and complaint about poor technology and lack of resources. Gone are the days when the lamers used to say, “Pakistan to ghareeb sa mulk hie ham yeh sab cheezain kahan sey afford kar saktey hein”. Lamers, is all I can say.

  2. In our country no one ever gets a penalty on doing anything wrong. No one knows how much oil is still there in the sea? Have we taken any measures to keep the species from extincting which died in the spill? Who will make sure that such a disastorous spill will not happen again?

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