Guimaras villagers brace for oil spill

ILOILO CITY—Coastal villages on Guimaras Island are bracing for an oil spill after bunker fuel coming from a sunken cargo ship reached their shores on Monday.

While a possible oil spill would be much smaller compared to the massive oil spill that devastated the island seven years ago, officials feared that the island’s rich marine resources and the livelihood of  fishermen would be affected again.

The MV Sportigo sank 90 feet to the bottom of the Iloilo Strait between Guimaras and Iloilo provinces after strong waves and wind dragged the ship from its anchorage area, causing its collision with another moored cargo vessel, the MV Jehan 5, early on Sunday. The Sportigo was carrying 12,000 liters of bunker fuel and 28,000 bags of fertilizer.

The crew of the sunken vessel told the Philippine Coast Guard that they had closed all fuel valves and pipelines before abandoning the ship.

Commodore Athelo Ybañez, head of the  Coast Guard in Western Visayas, confirmed on Monday that “small patches” of bunker fuel had contaminated the waters off Barangay (village) Hoskyn in Jordan town.

“An oil spill, even of a small magnitude, can harm our environment. We have alerted barangay officials and residents of coastal villages to implement preventive and mitigating measures,” Guimaras Gov. Samuel Gumarin told the Inquirer.

Gumarin said bunker fuel had reached the shores of Barangay Rizal in the capital town of Jordan less than 24 hours after the cargo vessel Sportigo sank early on Sunday in the middle of the Iloilo Strait between Iloilo and Guimaras.

“The residents reported traces of bunker fuel reaching the shores. There is also a strong odor coming from the fuel,” the governor said.

Ybañez said an oil sheen was monitored coming from the site of the sinking. The black coating was measured at 5 meters wide and 2 kilometers long, and was being swept by currents to spread toward Guimaras.

Dispersants were being sprayed on droplets of the bunker fuel, the Coast Guard official said.

The coastal villages have been advised to put up improvised oil spill booms made from bamboo poles, dagami (rice straw) and other absorbent indigenous materials.

The Iloilo City Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Office has also been monitoring signs of any oil spill, according to its operations chief, Darwin Papa.

Many areas on Guimaras were smeared with bunker oil on Aug. 11, 2006, after the MT Solar 1, chartered by Petron Corp., sank in stormy seas southeast of the island, spilling more than 2.1 million liters of bunker fuel on its way from Bataan to Zamboanga.

It was considered the country’s worst marine disaster and contaminated the island’s rich and diverse ecology.