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The Mega Borg Oil Spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico on June 8, 1990, roughly 50 miles off the coast of Texas, when the oil tanker Mega Borg caught on fire and exploded. The cleanup was one of the first practical uses of bioremediation. == Initial explosion and cause == At 11:30 PM on the evening of Saturday June 8, 1990,〔Leveille, Thomas P.. "The Mega Borg Fire and Oil Spill: A Case Study." U.S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Office Oil Spill Conference (1991): n. pag.ioscproceedings.org. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.〕 an explosion in the cargo room of the Norwegian oil tanker the Mega Borg “ruptured the bulkhead between the pump room and the engine room”,〔 causing the ship to catch fire and begin to leak oil.〔 The 853-foot-long, 15-year-old vessel was about 50 miles off the coast of Galveston, Texas when the explosion occurred. The weather at the time was calm and the tanker had easily passed Coast Guard safety inspections in April earlier that year.〔 While the direct cause of the engine room explosion remains unknown, the initial blast occurred during a lightening process in which the Mega Borg was transferring oil onto a smaller Italian tanker, the Fraqmura, in order to then transport the oil to Houston.〔Reports, Wire. "FIREBOATS ATTACK GULF TANKER BLAZE." Journal of Commerce () 12 June 1990, sec. MARITIME: 3B. Lexis Nexis. Web. 21 Jan. 2014.〕 This transfer was necessary, as the Mega Borg was too large to dock at the Texas port. Three million gallons of the total 38 million gallons of light Angolan Palanca crude oil on board the tanker were able to be transferred to the Fraqmura before the blast. Two days after the initial blast, there were five successive explosions in a ten-minute window. These explosions greatly increased the rate of the spill from the tanker into the water. By the end of that day (June 11) the tanker stern had dropped 58 feet and had stabilized five feet above the water line.〔 This was either due to shifting cargo or the tanker taking on water, which would be an indication of the vessel’s imminent sinking. The light crude oil spilled in the Mega Borg incident was brown and evaporated much quicker than the heavy crude oil in spills such as the Exxon Valdez. This means that the oil is less likely to heavily coat nearby beaches, flora and fauna, however the tanker was carrying more oil than the Exxon Valdez incident spilled in total, so there was a lot of concern about the oil not being able to evaporate if the slick became too thick.〔 The fire caused by the initial explosion took eight days to burn out, making it hard for firefighters to board the tanker and stop the leakage of oil.〔 However, the fire was helpful in the fact that it functioned as a natural in situ burning – out of the over 4.6 million spilled gallons, only 12,000 to 40,000 were left after the fire had burned out both on the water and on the tanker.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Mega Borg Oil Spill」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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