Posts Tagged ‘fun’
(Summer|Vacations|Holidays} Blog 1st Post
BP’s Gulf spill is getting all the press, but China’s pipeline blast in a northern port famous for its beaches is nearly as scary. Dan Levin reports on workers cleaning oil with their bare hands, the media clampdown, and more.
An explosion sends crude oil gushing into the sea. Authorities close beaches as frantic cleanup efforts commence, followed by government officials arriving to take stock of the damage and investigate the cause of the spill. Local tourism and fishing industries suffer. Environmentalists cry foul, accusing the government of failing to protect the nation’s natural resources in favor of swift profits. Reports surface that journalists are being kept away from the scene as those in power attempt to limit the political and economic fallout.
“Any criticism launched at the company would be considered an attack on the government, so the media is very quiet.”
If this sounds like the BP oil spill, think again. For the last week, this series of events has taken place here in China after a state-owned pipeline belonging to China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s largest oil and gas producer by volume, exploded last Friday off the coast of Dalian, a northern port city famous for its beaches. The blasts sent 1,500 tons of crude oil into the Yellow Sea and sparked 100-foot-high flames that burned for 15 hours. While media has reported that the leak has been stopped and Dalian’s vice mayor he the cleanup effort to take only five days, oil has spread over 165 square miles and other government officials have they think the operation could last weeks, with environmental damage possibly continuing for years.
According to Greenpeace China spokesman Wang Xiaojun, the government has failed to warn tourists of the danger washing ashore at the height of beach season. Despite the spill, Greenpeace staff members have seen kids playing in the contaminated waters off beaches that have not been closed. “It’s really scary,” said Wang.
Also clueless about protecting their skin from the crude oil are local fishermen, who are doing most of the cleanup using their bare hands, without wearing face masks.
Others tasked with removing the crude are just barely prepared“We don’t have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks,” a local official told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper. “This kind of inefficiency means the oil will keep coming to shore.”
Thanks to the inefficiency of BP and American government regulators, China’s cleanup efforts trigger a disturbing sense of déjà vu. More than 1,000 workers, from soldiers to local fishermen, have joined in cleaning up the spill, using oil-eating bacteria, solvents, straw mats, and even buckets, along with 800 fishing boats and 40 ships. One soldier drowned on Tuesday when he was swept away by a wave after he and another soldier jumped into the oil slick to fix an underwater pump.
The Chinese media has hailed him as a martyr and splashed dramatic pictures of soldiers rescuing the survivor across official newspapers and websites—until Thursday afternoon, when the stories about the spill sank from the homepages of China’s news websites. The coverage was drowned out by news of major floods elsewhere in the country and ominous headlines about the looming U.S.-South Korean naval exercises in the Yellow Sea, which the Chinese media has been lately flogging as evidence of a Western plot to undermine China’s territorial sovereignty.
While the spill in the Gulf of Mexico and scathing criticism of those responsible for its cleanup have dominated Western headlines and editorials for months, China’s state-media has avoided assigning blame for the spill or criticizing the government’s regulatory shortcomings in risk management and energy policy.
Nobody in China is the least bit surprised by these omissions. Unlike BP, China National Petroleum is a state-owned enterprise with deep connections to the central government. “Any criticism launched at the company would be considered an attack on the government, so the media is very quiet,” Liu Junning, an expert on political science at the Institute of Chinese Culture in Beijing. “The company’s management team consists of high-ranking officials, which makes it nearly impossible to hold them accountable.”
An unidentified man drowned off the shore of Venice late Saturday while on a group fishing excursion.
The middle-aged man entered the water just north of the Venice breakwater at about 11 p.m. and was caught in the current, Los Angeles County Lifeguard Chief Mickey Gallagher said. Witnesses heard him yell for help but could not see him in the dark.
Lifeguard and LAPD search units responded to a witness' 911 call and searched the water until an LAPD helicopter found the man floating face down near the breakwater rocks at about 11:20 p.m., Gallagher said. The man was unconscious and unresponsive when he was found, and was pronounced dead at the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital shortly before midnight.
The Los Angeles County coroner's office had not identified the body as of Sunday morning.
– Abby Sewell