Firefighters Tuesday put out a six-day-old blaze on a Danish supertanker with a huge blanket of foam, and the shipowners said booms being installed around the vessel should staunch oil feeding a 20-mile-long slick.
"We're very happy with the current situation," a spokesman for A.P. Moller (Singapore) told Reuters. "At least it seems we have avoided a bigger pollution problem."The 255,312-ton Maersk Navigator has been belching tons of oil into the Andaman Sea since Thursday after colliding with another tanker, the Sanko Honour, while carrying nearly two million barrels of crude from Oman to Japan.
"We now estimate a total of about 25,000 tons of oil has poured out, all burned or evaporated or dissipating," the A.P. Moller spokesman said. "We have about 350 metres (1,150 feet) of rubber oil booms (barriers) being deployed around the whole of the ship. That will contain the oil."
The oil spill has created a pollution alert in the region, home to some endangered species including rare turtles and the dugong, a large mammal that may have been the origin of the legendary mermaid.
But the slick threatening the nearest land, palm-fringed beaches on India's tropical Great Nicobar island, is now less of a threat after natural dispersal and India's anti-pollution efforts.
"Verbally we were informed that the oil slick presently tracking the vessel breaks up around 30 miles south of the Nicobar islands," the A.P. Moller spokesman said.