spill

Spreading is the horizontal expansion of an oil slick due to gravity, inertia, viscosity, and surface tension forces, which plays an important role in the fate process of surface spilled oil.

In 1972, for example, BP's Cherry Point refinery spilled about 7500 litres of crude oil into the Pacific Ocean.

External corrosion on a pipeline pumping crude was the root cause of the rupture last May that spilled over 140,000 gallons of oil on the Santa Barbara coast, federal regulators reported.

Officials of Teresa town in Rizal province-which ended up a catch basin for spilled bunker fuel-were considering suing the cement company responsible for leaking oil into the Teresa River.

Some 3,800 barrels spilled, according to an investigation by Shell and government officials.

In 2011, the National Oil Spill Detection Response Agency estimated that around 40,000 barrels were spilled when a tanker was loading crude at the offshore platform operated by Shell's subsidiary SNEPCO, but SNEPCO attributed the spill to "snapped loading hose under water."

Conditions in the Arctic region impose unique challenges for personnel charged with (1) oil spill response, the process of getting people and equipment to the incident, and (2) cleanup duties, either recovering the spilled oil or mitigating the contamination so that it poses less harm to the ecosystem.

Shell said about 216 tonnes of oil, equal to 1,300 barrels, may have spilled into the sea so far.

"Only traces of oil were spilled and we all know that had there been huge amounts of oil, we wouldn't have been able to contain the incident so quickly," Haddad said.

Gallons of Event Oil Spilled Description Gulf War 252 million- Iraqi forces opened up oil wells 1991 363 million and pipelines as they retreated from the neighboring country of Kuwait.