Lab test can’t tell source of oil spill in Mindoro

CLEANUP CREW Residents and village officials in Pola, Oriental Mindoro, clean up their shores on Tuesday following a fresh
oil spill that hit the waters off the villages of Buhay na Tubig and Bacawan more than a year after the sinking of oil tanker MT Princess Empress. —POLA MAYOR JENNIFER CRUZ FACEBOOK

CITY OF CALAPAN — Samples from a fresh oil slick that reached the shores of Pola town in Oriental Mindoro have been subjected to laboratory tests, but an official of the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) said they could not yet determine its source.

Capt. Airland Lapitan of the PCG station in Oriental Mindoro, in a telephone interview on Thursday, told the Inquirer that the sample subjected to laboratory test was “thin,” so its source could not be easily identified. Lapitan said the PCG received the test result on Thursday from its Marine Environmental Protection Command in Southern Tagalog.

“The sample that they tested is already thin so they could not identify the source. Other oil samples were already diluted [or had] evaporated [from the mixture with water],” he said.

Residents and barangay officials who conducted a coastal cleanup gathered the samples from the shores in the villages of Buhay na Tubig and Bacawan in Pola on Tuesday.

READ: Only 627 of 4000 fishers compensated for oil spill

Pola Mayor Jennifer Cruz, in her Facebook post on Tuesday, said the cleanup yielded three bags of oil debris.

She described the collected oil samples as having similar texture and smell to the oil spill seen by locals after the sinking of the tanker MT Princess Empress on Feb. 28 last year.

Princess Empress was carrying 800,000 liters of industrial fuel when it sank off Naujan town last year, causing a massive oil spill that polluted surrounding waters and disrupted the livelihood of local fishers. The Department of Justice, in February this year, recommended criminal charges against the vessel’s owners and several others over falsified documents.

MT Princess Empress is owned by RDC Reield Marine Services. It sank off Oriental Mindoro while on its way to Iloilo province to transport industrial fuel oil from Limay, Bataan.

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Cruz said authorities should admit whether they should still expect spillage from the sunken tanker.

In a telephone interview on Thursday, the mayor said that they should be told about the real situation regarding Princess Empress “so locals would better know how to position themselves and handle the situation.”

“Not that they would be surprised every now and then about oil spill[s],” she said.

“We are the ones experiencing the slick. Every now and then, there would appear some. They just capped the tanker—they admitted that—and did some bagging. Some [of the fuel cargo] may have been removed. But we are also speculating: Did anyone throw oil or what? I do not know,” she added.

Pola residents, she said, are “tired” of cleaning up their shores.

The mayor said they had earlier requested oil spill booms but did not receive any from the owner of the sunken vessel.

“We want to know, is there still oil? So we would be prepared to clean up; so we won’t be surprised. We were hoping that [the environmental disaster] was over, so we lifted the state of calamity during the first year anniversary of the sinking of the tanker,” she said.

The group Protect Verde Island Passage (Protect VIP) said it was worried that the new oil spill “would add up to the already existing damage in the VIP.”

“Our greatest concern is the potential oil spills in the future if the VIP remains … unprotected,” Protect VIP said in a statement on Wednesday.