Presentation Summary for IAIA Conference in New Orleans, USA

Emergency EIA on
Oil Spill by CIS Tanker in the Japan Sea

ABSTRACTS

On January 2, 1997, CIS's large oil tanker, fully loaded was stranded in the Japan Sea on her way back to Russia. The spilling of C type heavy oil came surging to the Japanese seashore for the sake of stormy weather of the Japan Sea typical in winter season.

Environmental Research Institute(ERI), members of IAIA Japan, had started preparing emergency environmental impact assessment on direction and speed of spilled oil drifting towards the seashore. The simulation system used for the case was the ERI's 3-dimensional computer aided dymamic models.

Prior to the simulation, one of the IAIA Japan member, Mr.Sawano had set up oil spill related mailing list (oil@seiryo.ac.jp) on his University's internet network on January 10.

ERI team has continued the real time computer simulation for about 10 days to provide information to the suffering local citizens and volunteers.The ncecessary data for the simulation such as meteorological data (wind direction and speed) and the real time conditions of the drifting oil in the area were all available from the internet mailing lists. Thus ERI had provided the simulated results to http://eritokyo.jp/ web site by both computer graphics and the comments on the results from January 13 to 23. There were approximately 3,000 accesses a day to ERI's JAPAN SEA OIL SPILL EIA HOME PAGE from all over Japan. Those were the National and Local governments staffs, univesities staffs, NGOs, voluntary groups and mass medeias.

ERI team has verified the simulation results by comparing the data with actual oil drifting courses on the Japan Sea and the damaged seashores of the area and also with the monitored data from the hellicopters and the satellite provided also in the internet mailing list.

(C)Copyright by Environmental Research Institute