Hello all,
As this list is a little quiet presently I thought I'd post this.
A friend of mine used to work for BP (British Petroleum) and shared the
following with me. The area of sea in question is the North Sea off the
NE coast of Scotland, near Aberdeen especially, where I'm from:
"Sorry if this is a bit vague. Firstly i must say that i have not witnessed
this first-hand but I was informed of the practice when i was working on the
B.P Forties Charlie platform. There was ALWAYS an oily film on the
surrounding sea water, some days it trailed off into the horizon. I noticed
this pollution to be especially bad one day and asked one of the older
technicians what caused it. He told me that sometimes if waste (probably
contaminated water) has to be dumped then it is done at night so that
passing aeroplane pilots do not report the resulting "oil slick". By the
morning the oil has usually dispersed and become invisible from the air.
Also of interest maybe. Have you ever heard of L.S.A (low specific
activity) scale? This is a radioactive scale which can form inside any
equipment which has crude oil passing through it. When i was on forties
charlie there was a major overhaul underway on an oil separator. This device
is basically a large vessel which is used to separate oil,gas and water.
This vessel was contaminated. Of course before anybody could work inside it,
it had to be decontaminated. This was done by sending cleaning people inside
(with protective equipment) to remove the scale and wash out the vessel. You
can guess what happened to the water used to wash it out. Suffice to say
that I don't imagine it was kept for decontamination. There were also some
components (pieces of pipe ect.) which were contaminated and left lying
around wrapped in "contaminated" warning tape. These bits would probably
have been shipped back with little regard paid to actively containing the
contamination. Although this scale is of "low activity" it is obvious that
with fishing boats operating and ofcourse, fish living in the vicinity of
these installations there is probably some risk to humans, in my opinion.
Also on the subject of L.S.A scale, I worked for some time on the B.P.
ship Seillean. This ship fills with oil at a well then unloads at a port. A
fellow trainee who was meant to be an electrician was given the task of
cleaning some "sand" from the bottom of an oil storage tank once it had been
emptied. He came into the control room some time later covered in sand. He
made himself a cup of tea, sat down and with a rather peeved voice said "They
just told me I should have had on a mask for that, this sand is radioactive."
