Can you even begin to imagine the amount of mess that a Japanese Oil Tanker, which collides with a Cargo Ship might make? Well then consider this; A Japanese Crude Oil Tanker spilled over 4,500 tons or 1.4 million gallons of crude oil in the Indian Ocean and Nicobar Islands. To put the seriousness of all this into perspective remember the Valdez in Alaska spilt 12 million gallons of crude oil, so this is about one tenth the size of that spill.

It seems with all these accidents, corroded pipelines, International Terrorist Events and weather problems that there may never be a balance of World Supply and World Demand for oil? Luckily this happened about 280 nautical miles from land and there were zero injuries, but let's just say neither of the shipping lines are happy and the fish well they are probably really pissed off.

Fortunately 1.4 million gallons of crude is not a significant loss in the over all supply and that ship did hold some 80 million gallons crude anyway, but surely the humans can do better than this when shipping their oil needs around the planet and back again. Consider all this in 2006.

Lance Winslow