Enviromental impact of Drumbeat

[doomlordis]

Nowadays if a tanker spills more than a litre the lefty eco warriors have a candlelit vidual , i have read many books on the Uboat campaign and a few specifcally on drumbeat.
There is no mention of the impact of sinking 52 tankers off the east coast of the US , i would imagine the impact would have been terrible and long lasting..

Anyone know more on this?

[mookiemookie]

Nowadays if a tanker spills more than a litre the lefty eco warriors have a candlelit vidual , i have read many books on the Uboat campaign and a few specifcally on drumbeat.
There is no mention of the impact of sinking 52 tankers off the east coast of the US , i would imagine the impact would have been terrible and long lasting..

Anyone know more on this?

You're a lefty eco warrior if you care at all about oil slicks ruining fish and wildlife and our beaches ? Noted. :nope:

And so as not to turn this into a General Topics crap slinging fest, I think the size of the tankers sunk has a lot to do with it. Not all were full, and they were generally less than 10,000 tons. The Exxon Valdez, for example, was 200,000 tons.

[doomlordis]

I was being sarci, i care about trees and bushes and fish as much as the next guy.

[coasterdigi]

Well, keep in mind that, in the US, the eco movement really didn't begin in earnest until we managed to light our river on fire up here in Cleveland...for the third time....in the 70's. I'm sure there was a significant local ecological impact, but I don't believe that people really paid that close of attention to stuff like that in the 40's.

Of course, you're assuming that the tankers spilled their entire volume of cargo into the ocean all at once, too. Judging from the fact that the USS Arizona is STILL leaking oil, I'd be willing to wager that only a percentage of the total oil on board was spilled at the time of the attack. 10,000 barrels spilled over 40 years is significantly different than 10,000 spilled over a few days.

[EDIT] Sorry, did I say "third time?" I meant thirteenth. Oh, Cleveland.

[Nausicaa]

Of course the sinking of ships did ecologic damage in WW2 - enormous damage. The thing is just that nobody thought about it back then, because there was no ecologic sensible thinking in general, and nobody measured any effects with scientific methods. Bu they were there.

[ggregoro]

Of course the sinking of ships did ecologic damage in WW2 - enormous damage. The thing is just that nobody thought about it back then, because there was no ecologic sensible thinking in general, and nobody measured any effects with scientific methods. Bu they were there.

Talk about your "no ecologic sensible thinking", in an attempt to ascertain the damage from atomic explosions, the US Navy made guinea pigs out of a fleet of obsolete warships and exposed whole lot of sailors to radiation in 1946.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ks4iLdMC8s

[Zachstar]

In war environmentalism goes out the window. Just idmagine how many species went extinct on the various hard fought pacific islands for one. However it was a completely different time back then. And I am pretty damn sure Hitler would have not given a damn killing a national park to build a factory to build tanks.

Most of the oil sunk was well out at sea while of course it still sucked. it would have quite a great deal of dilution before getting anywhere near shore.

Todays tankers are huge beyond belief. Many are bigger than WW2 aircraft carriers. If say north korea would have torpedoed one of those instead it would have been an ecological disaster the likes of Validez

[Hartmann]

An important factor also is the effect of the warhead explossion , because it can burn a lot of Fuel

http://uscgaviationhistory.aoptero.org/images/history02/Allied_tanker_torpedoed.jpg

[Webster]

:nope:

if your worried about the resulting pollution from war then dont forget pearl harbor was poluted after the attack with the whole harbor filled with dead bodies, spilled guts, and oil and gas everywhere.

in europe there was all the bombing of the war industry and chemical plants, the normandy beaches were scared and ecologically damaged from all the defensive structures and the shelling for allied landings.

this is the subsim sh5 forum, so shouldnt we be talking about the game here?

topics like this belong in general topics where its more logical to discuss this stuff?

[Moeceefus]

something like a million gallons a day has been spilling into the gulf since april 20. i find myself more concerned with that at the moment.

one tonne of crude oil is roughly equal to 308 US gallons or 7.33 barrels and 1 oil barrel is equal to 42 US gallons approx.

interesting how the decay of an ancient past can be responsible for the decay of a distant future, though that seems to be the case in most areas of life.

[janh]

Before the 70's changes in standards and society that probably lead to the environmental movements, what did people do with their old oil after an oil change on their car? There was no waste collection facility, nor were there draconic penalties as there now in most western industry nations. The rules for obtaining and disposing of chemicals also were essentially non-existent.
So I think the "environmental damage" was the least worry, if a thought at all at that time. Economics and the impact on war, hence on national sovereignty were the major factors. This has changed dramatically over the last 40 years.

[Webster]

Before the 70's changes in standards and society that probably lead to the environmental movements, what did people do with their old oil after an oil change on their car? .

:hmmm: to the best of my recollection it was used as weed killer and just poured along fences and into ditches to kill grass

[AVGWarhawk]

Of course the sinking of ships did ecologic damage in WW2 - enormous damage. The thing is just that nobody thought about it back then, because there was no ecologic sensible thinking in general, and nobody measured any effects with scientific methods. Bu they were there.

Correct. Even today a uboat leaks mercury and is a great hazard. The oil spilt did create problems. Large whales were hit by subs and vessels. Coral reefs were destroyed in the Pacific.

[AVGWarhawk]

You're a lefty eco warrior if you care at all about oil slicks ruining fish and wildlife and our beaches ? Noted. :nope:

And so as not to turn this into a General Topics crap slinging fest, I think the size of the tankers sunk has a lot to do with it. Not all were full, and they were generally less than 10,000 tons. The Exxon Valdez, for example, was 200,000 tons.


Will not be a slingfest. Looks like a legitimate question to me.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,455652,00.html

[Sailor Steve]

Todays tankers are huge beyond belief. Many are bigger than WW2 aircraft carriers.
Actually even the smallest supertankers are vastly larger than any of today's biggest aircraft carriers.

[Wulfmann]

By the time I turned 5 years old in May 1954 my family had been living in Boca Raton Florida for 4 months (Population 1,200 people then).

We went to the beach often and always brought a can of gasoline to rub off the oils we got on our feet as it was everywhere in small balls.

We all knew it was from tankers sunk more than a decade earlier, just accepted it.
Most tankers sunk off the coast would have had the larger part of their cargo taken out to see in the gulf stream so the impact would have been small compared to the Exxon Valdez or the BP accident in the gulf.

Wulfmann

[captainprid]

Actually there was a very interesting article in the paper recently about this very subject. The sinking of tankers during WW2 did far less damage than the sinking of U-Boats and war ships. The reason being is during WW2 tankers carried refined products like Petrol rather than crude, therefore when they were torpedoed they tended to go bang in a big way, the result was that the product was Burnt off and very easily dispersed whereas crude oil can not be so easily burnt off, certain elements can but it tends to leave behind the heavier product.
This changed after the war mainly due to instability within oil producing countries, that is why during WW2 there were hardly any refineries in Britain but after the war, refineries sprung up everywhere

[msalama]

For anyone interested in these things there's an excellent Internet-released scientific article / paper about the general ecological damage of WW2 somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find it just now :nope: Oh well, maybe someone with a better Google-phrase brain will dig it up for ya...

Yours,

A lefty eco-warrior :D