|
AGAINST THE CURRENT
Lessons from
Jessica:
It's Time
To Get Serious About Oil Spills
By Captain Paul Watson
It was late evening on January
16, 2001, when the Ecuadorian-registered tanker Jessica struck
a reef just outside the appropriately named Wreck Bay, in the
azure waters just off San Cristobal Island in the Galapagos.
When a dying oil tanker spews
her foul guts into the sea, the agony of her victims, choking
and drowning in her fetid filth, creates images that circulate
around the planet. Images of pitifully helpless penguins, convulsing
cormorants, and in this latest spill in the Galapagos, struggling
marine iguanas, lava gulls, sea lions, and pelicans.
My ship, the Sirenian, a ninety-five-foot
former United States Coast Guard cutter, arrived a few hours
later to find the tanker wallowing on the reef, a jagged rock
piercing her hull, and sea water gushing into her engine room.
We found her tanks, thankfully, still intact.
It was obvious, however, that
the ship was doomed. She could not be pulled off the reef without
sinking and it was just a matter of hours before the battering
swells would rupture her thin, single-hulled skin. Only a few
millimeters of rusty steel stood between the pristine waters
of the Galapagos Marine Reserve and 175,000 gallons of diesel
fuel, along with 80,000 gallons of molasses-thick bunker fuel
oil.
Her captain and crew were unqualified
and did not have proper charts. In fact, the chart for the harbor
she was approaching was not even on board. She was an uninsured,
rust-encrusted calamity waiting to happen. We found the ship
to be mechanically and electronically unseaworthy. How could
a ship with such glaring deficiencies be allowed to go to sea?
Even worse, how could she be allowed to transport such a dangerous
cargo?
Our investigation and inquiries
were met with a stern warning. We were told to be very careful
what we asked.
The reason for this warning became
very clear when we discovered the ship to be owned by Actramar,
a company partly owned by a former military port captain from
the Galapagos who also happens to be the nephew of the Ecuadorian
Minister of Defense.
The Jessica had not been scheduled
to arrive at San Cristobal. She was en route to Baltra, the official
off-loading port for the islands, but had been re-routed to the
port of Baquerizo Moreno on San Cristobal for the purpose of
refueling the largest ecotourism boat in the islands, the Galapagos
Explorer.
The ecotourist ship was running
behind schedule and did not have time to go to the designated
fueling port. Unbeknownst to the national park, she had been
given an exemption by the government in Quito to take on fuel
directly from the Jessica.
The Galapagos Explorer is the
only boat in the Galapagos that uses bunker C fuel oil. She had
been granted an operating permit by the government, despite objections
from the Galapagos National Park.
One thing that I discovered very
quickly in Ecuador is that access is a purchasable commodity.
I was only there for a week before I was offered a permanent
resident card for the Galapagos for only $250. Surely, I suggested,
if I were to buy such a card, it would be spotted as a counterfeit.
"No Senor, it is not counterfeit; it will be signed by the
appropriate government official. It will be a real card,"
was the answer.
Thus I came to understand how
there were 17,000 people living on the islands and over 50,000
resident cards issued. Many of those resident cards are held
by fishermen from the mainland and in effect are resident fishing
licenses.
There is no agency in Ecuador
with the experience or the equipment to tackle a major spill.
The national park immediately requested the assistance of the
United States Coast Guard. We thought that it was imperative
to begin pumping out the fuel, to at least start the process
until some heavier muscle arrived. We had some small pumps and
a three-thousand-gallon tank, and we could off-load to tanker
trucks on the nearby shore.
We were surprised when the Ecuadorian
navy promptly informed us that we were not to touch the oil.
It was the private property of Petroecuador. If we, or the rangers
from the national park, removed one drop of oil from the ship,
we would be charged with theft.
Meanwhile the call to the U.S.
Coast Guard was bogged down in negotiations because the Ecuadorian
government refused to meet the demands of the U.S. government
for the estimated $600,000 in costs to send the oil spill strike
team from the gulf coast to this World Heritage Site.
What is the point of declaring
a World Heritage Site unless the entire commonwealth of nations
is prepared to come to its aid? For four days, we stood helplessly
alongside the battered and groaning Jessica, until her hull began
to ooze oil. Her foul guts were spilling, and the iridescent
creeping slick of diesel was soon punctuated with the thick ebony
molasses of heavy bunker fuel. It was not long before the first
endangered lava gull was spotted, soaked in black tar; helplessly
beating its wings as it attempted to escape from the lethal glue.
The U.S. Coast Guard finally
did arrive. There was little they could do. The oil was in the
sea.
We had had a four-day window,
plenty of time to have pumped the ship clean. This was an oil-spill
disaster that could have been prevented if not for the bureaucratic
nit-picking of politicians and government agencies. A four-day
debate over a $600,000 bill resulted in a spill estimated at
in excess of five million dollars to clean up.
Although permission to act was
delayed, once given the go-ahead, we all tried. My crew joined
forces with the Coast Guard, and for the next two weeks we worked
side by side with the rangers from the national park and volunteers
and staff of the Darwin Research station.
On my ship, the Sirenian, our
shower stalls became iguana cleaning stations and our decks reeked
of a slick oily film. Our crew slept soaked in oil, their food
tasted like oil, and their lungs burned from the fumes. In the
end, thanks to the favorable winds and currents, and a hot tropical
sun that evaporated the diesel quickly, the damage was far less
than what could have occurred. The Galapagos were lucky.
However, we learned a lesson.
The world simply does not take the threat of oil spills seriously.
If we did, we would have been prepared. We were not. In fact,
we have never been prepared.
This was the fifth oil spill
that my organization, Sea Shepherd Conservation International,
has been involved in within the last year alone. In December
1999, the oil tanker Erika fouled the coast of Normandy in France.
We dispatched dozens of volunteers to the tarred beaches to clean
birds. The same month, the Russian tanker Volgoneft 248 spilled
900 tons of gasoline into the Marmara Sea along the coast of
Turkey. We set up a bird cleaning station within days of the
spill. Last January, a ruptured pipeline sent over 300,000 gallons
of crude oil into Gunanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro. Sea Shepherd
responded with a marine mammal rescue and rehabilitation team
and we drafted the first Brazilian training program for oiled
wildlife rescue. Sea Shepherd responded again in July 2000, when
another rupture of the Petrobras pipeline spilled over a million
gallons into the Barigui, a tributary of the Iguacu River in
Parana State.
In each of these cases we found
the local authorities both unprepared and unenthusiastic about
tackling the disaster. We found most of the major environmental
and conservation organizations to be more concerned about boycotting
oil companies and hanging protest banners than in getting their
hands dirty cleaning birds. Unfortunately, one thing all these
spills had in common was the delay in launching an effective
response. By the time the red tape was sorted out, the oil had
already claimed large numbers of birds and marine mammals.
What is truly needed is an international
oil spill marine wildlife rescue team that has the capability
of reaching any oil spill anywhere in the world within hours
of an accident.
Protesting against the oil companies
won't solve the problem. This world is run on petroleum and protesting
is not going to stop the flow of oil. As long as the world is
economically addicted to oil, oil spills will be inevitable.
The objective is not to attack the oil companies but to create
a coalition of conservationists and oil producers.
Together we need to establish
four airborne teams equipped with wildlife cleaning equipment
and emergency pumps and equipment. We could address the response
delay by organizing twenty-four-hour emergency response teams
capable of reaching any oil spill or potential spill on the planet
within twelve hours. The estimated cost of the project per team
is three million dollars to purchase and outfit two planes and
an annual operating budget of one million dollars to train and
field a team of volunteers. Four teams could cover the globe
with a guarantee of a quick response.
This is a small investment in
comparison to the damage just one oil spill can cause. The fact
that my organization, Sea Shepherd Conservation International,
responded to five major oil spills during the last year - and
there were many more that we were not able to respond to - indicates
that there is a real need to organize and provide an effective
oil-spill wildlife rescue response team.
Another spill will happen again
soon. What we have learned from the Jessica disaster is that
if a World Heritage Site and a biological treasure house like
the Galalagos is not safe, then there is no safe place.
We need to be prepared next time.
This article appeared in the
Summer 2001 issue of Ocean Realm magazine and appears
here by permission.
P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor,
WA 98250 (USA) Tel: 360-370-5650 Fax: 360-370-5651
Copyright © 2004 Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society. All rights reserved.
return
|
