Were trying our hardest on cleaning up the oil spill. It’s taking more than 11,000 works to clean up all of the oil that has destructed Alaska. Our first method of cleaning it up is using Dispersant. Dispersant is a surfactant and solvent mixture. A surfactant is a surface-active substance. Examples of it are: Soaps and Detergents. Yesterday, March 25 at 12:00am a private company applied us with this mixture. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough wave action to mix the dispersant with the oil in the water, so therefore it was discontinued. During the early stages of when the oil spill we did one trial burn. A trial burn is an area where we tried burning the oil. It was very successful; it reduced 113,400 liters of oil.

I have just received news that the effects of the oil spill on the environment are huge! It destroyed microbial populations on the shoreline. Thousands of animals died such as, 250,000 to 500,000 seabirds, at least 1,000 sea otters, and 250 bald eagles. Many organisms such as plankton are the basis of the costal marine food chain, while others like fungi and bacteria are capable of facilitating biodegradation of oil. Ducks and Sea Otters have higher death rates partially because they ingested prey from contaminated soil and ingestion of oil residues on hair due to grooming.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

So I just received a phone call about an oil spill, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez was headed for Washington at 9:12pm last night. A harbor pilot guided the ship through the Narrows; he returned control to Joseph Hazelwood. Joseph Hazelwood is the ships master and began to navigate the ship after consuming alcohol. After 11:00pm he tried avoiding any icebergs headed his way. The coast guard gave permission to go out through the inbound lane with precautions, but Hazelwood failed to keep watch and the ship struck Bligh Reef earlier today at 12:04am. I had thought to myself people are going to want to know about this, so I should blog about it. According to the official reports the ship was carrying 53.1 million U.S. gallons of oil. About 10.8 million U.S. gallons were spilled into the Prince William Sound.