One hundred twenty-five commercial fishers in Cordova, Alaska, completed a mailed survey regarding current mental health functioning 6 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Economic and social impacts of the oil spill and coping and psychological functioning (modified Coping Strategies Scales, Symptom Checklist 90-R) were measured. Multiple regression was used to test the utility of the Conse...

A scenario-specific modeling of oil blowout from the Khark island pipelines in the Persian Gulf has been carried out to evaluate the environmental impact of oil spill on the local coast, seabed and prawns. Also, various scenarios for response actions have been considered. The analyses have been performed by SINTEF Oil Spill Contingency and Response (OSCAR), a 3-dimensional model system. At the ...

Ecological disasters resulting from oil spills have created a great need to find more efficient materials for oil spill cleanup. This research highlights the use of a novel macroporous polymeric material based on butyl rubber (BR) as a sorbent in an oil spill cleanup. The sorption capacity of BR for crude oil and petroleum products is 15-23 g g(-1) as compared to the value of 10-16 g g(-1) obta...

Oil spill microcosms experiments were carried out to evaluate the effect of bioemulsificant exopolysaccharide (EPS₂₀₀₃) on quick stimulation of hydrocarbonoclastic bacteria. Early hours of oil spill, were stimulated using an experimental seawater microcosm, supplemented with crude oil and EPS₂₀₀₃ (SW+OIL+EPS₂₀₀₃); this system was monitored for 2 days and compared to control microcosm (only oil-...

This paper presents a deterministic mathematical model, which simulates the time-dependent behavior of an oil spill near coastal zones. The model solves the full set of partial-differential equations that govern transient, two-phase, turbulent flow and heat/mass transfer phenomena. It is used for predicting the consequences of hypothetical oil spills that could occur near a coastal area of grea...

A neural network approach for semi-automatic detection of oil spills in European remote sensing satellite-synthetic aperture radar (ERS-SAR) imagery is presented. The network input is a vector containing the values of a set of features characterizing an oil spill candidate. The classification performance of the algorithm has been evaluated on a data set containing verified examples of oil spill...

The devastating environmental impacts of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and its media notoriety made it a frequent comparison to the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the popular press in 2010, even though the nature of the two spills and the environments impacted were vastly different. Fortunately, unlike higher organisms that are adversely impacted by oil spills, microorganisms are able to consum...

After the grounding of the Exxon Valdez and its subsequent oil spill, all parties with interests in Prince William Sound (PWS) were eager to prevent another major pollution event. While they implemented several measures to reduce the risk of an oil spill, the stakeholders disagreed about the effectiveness of these measures and the potential effectiveness of further proposed measures. They forme...

After the destruction of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform during the spring of 2010, the northern Gulf of Mexico was threatened by an oil spill from the Macondo well. Emergency responders were concerned about oil transport in the nearshore, where it threatened immediately the fishing waters and coastline from Louisiana to Florida. In this region, oil movement was influenced by a continen...

In this study, we measured via surgical sampling hepatic EROD activity in yellow-legged gulls from oiled and unoiled colonies, 17 months after the Prestige oil spill. We also analyzed stable isotope composition in feathers of the biopsied gulls, in an attempt to monitor oil incorporation into marine food web. We found that yellow-legged gulls in oiled colonies were being exposed to remnant oil ...