The next time someone complains about an oil spill, bring up the impact of forest fires to make the point that fires due more harm to people, property and the environment than oil spills.
Both are bad and needed to be prevented from human causes, but given a choice for my own survival, I would pick an oil spill.
There is no Slick the Oil Spill, but there is a Smokey the Bear.
Spills that happen on open water can be contained if acted upon quickly with the most of the oil able to be contained or skimmed off since oil is generally less dense than water.
Marine life, mammals and birds are obviously impacted by oil spills that can also foul beaches but few if any people are harmed by them.
Yes 11 people were killed in the BP-leased drilling rig Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 but none from the spill itself.
BP reached a settlement in July with U.S. authorities to pay $18.7 billion in damages for the Gulf of Mexico spill.
By contrast, taxpayers, not companies are on the hook for the cost of human caused and nature caused forest fires.
The government of Saskatchewan exceeded its annual firefighting budget in June due to fires raging in the north.
That cost included sheltering more than 13,000 evacuees from affected communities by July 7 due to fire and thick smoke.
Smoke affected the air quality of a big chunk of the population and most of the province.
An oil spill in a river can threaten downstream drinking water or local fishing, but those threats tend to be short-lived and containable within the water body compared to wildfires whipped by wind.
When a forest burns the wood resource is lost for at least 60 years and the scorched earth is a visual eyesore until regrowth kicks in.
Fires can also burn through entire communities as one did in Slave Lake in 2011.
The amount of carbon dioxide emitted by a forest fires can be enormous. The smoke forces people to stay indoors for their own health.
People who drive vehicles fueled by gasoline made from oil that can spill are not asked to stay indoors instead of driving.
More of us should buy less polluting vehicles for our own good.
Somehow the media and the public views forest fires as a rite of nature despite the fact that many of them are caused by people.
Oil spills are almost always caused by employees or oil related companies that end up paying for cost of clean-up.
If an oil spill results from a ruptured pipeline or a rail car it is easy to determine the location of the spill and the exact volume of the spill and the type of oil.
The flow of oil and that is spilled by a pipeline can be turned off by valves. When all the oil in a tanker is spilled or burned there is no more to spill or burn.
When it comes to forest fires there could be multiple fires all at once with wind and accessibility factoring into slower response times leading to ever larger fires.
Probably the most dangerous oil spills to respond to are ones from derailed trains, especially in built up urban areas.
The Lac-Mégantic rail disaster in July 2013 that killed 47 people is considered a transportation safety issue and a failure of the engineer to apply sufficient hand brakes.
It’s led to an overhaul of rail transportation safety and enforcement and ushered in safer tankers that are less prone to rupturing in a derailment.
In the total scheme of things forest fires have killed more people and destroyed more natural resources and property that every oil spill on record.
Both are bad for the environment and human health but arsonists don’t cause oil spills or explosions from spilled oil but they do set forest fires.
I’m just saying.
