Bahia Las Minas, Panama Oil Spill Assessment, 1986-1991 (NCEI Accession 9400033)

In April 1986 a major oil spill from a ruptured storage tank at a local refinery just east of the Caribbean entrance to the Panama Canal polluted an area of coral reefs, mangrove forests, and grassbeds along the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama. The area affected included a biological reserve of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) where baseline biological and environmental data had been collected for the previous 15 years. Shortly after the spill, a grant to study the effects of the spill was received from the Minerals Management Service of the United States Department of the Interior. Data was then collected from May of 1986 to October of 1991 by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute under Minerals Management Service contracts 14-12-0001-30355 and 14-12-0001-30393. These data are filed under NCEI Accession #9400033. Results of the study were published as a technical report of the MMS (Keller and Jackson, 1993.) The project was divided into 8 subprojects to study the chemistry of the oil and 7 different environments affected by the spill, which included seagrass, coral, and mangrove communities. The study continued in part for an additional year under another grant, but that data is not included here, nor is data collected before the spill or data collected by the STRI ESP program.