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Oil Spills and the Marine Environment
SPILL
PREVENTION FROM TANKER ACCIDENTS ON THE SEAS
Figure 2-2
shows the amount of crude oil transported by sea annually for the
past few years, with projections for future years. The past data
agrees with other estimates of oil transported (). At the present
time, about 1.5 billion metric tons of oil are transported by sea
each year. As shown in Table 1-1, approximately 250,000 tons of oil
per year are spilled due to tanker casualties. It is likely that
this is an underestimate, because some spills due to tanker
casualties far from land are not reported. Even so, pollution due
to tanker casualties is frequently in the public eye because of the
large amounts of oil that are sometimes spilled. Porricelli ()
provides a comprehensive analysis of tanker casualties for 1969 and
1970 covering 1,416 of them, including 269 that caused pollution.
Figure 2-3 shows a breakdown of the polluting incidents in terms of
the type of casualties. Two hundred nine of the 269 polluting
incidents occurred in harbors, harbor entrances, coastal zones, and
at piers. Except for a few casualties at unknown locations, most of
the remaining sixty casualties occurred
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