Lessons from an oil spill

THE oil spill that sullied Sydney Harbour, early in August, was tiny in comparison with what might occur in the Pacific but it still created a mess that took hundreds of Ports and Environment staff days to clean.

The spill was first noticed at around 6:35 on the evening of Tuesday, August 3. An Italian tanker, Laura D’Amato, was just hours into the 2-day job of unloading its cargo of middle eastern light crude oil at the Shell terminal, in the inner harbour, when a crew member was alerted by a sulphurous stench coming off the water.

The pumps were halted, Shell management and the Ports Authority were alerted and the containment effort swung into action. Laura D’Amato was sealed off from the wider harbour with a floating boom, a boat with oil skimming equipment (kept on 24hour stand-by for just such accidents) arrived on the scene and the emergency plan was activated. But it was too late to stop 300,000 litres of oil escaping into the harbour.

At its height the oil slick stretched 10 kilometers. The smell was so overpowering that television presenters broadcasting the evening news from studios 5 kilometers from the Shell terminal complained repeatedly about the problem and events at the Sydney Opera House were called off mid-way through the performance.

By morning the scale of the spill, now likely to become the cen tre of New South Wales’ biggest oil spill prosecution, was visible.

Brown scum and dying shellfish and crustaceans could be seen along a chain of beaches and rocky outcrops on the Harbour’s northern shore and the sheen of the slick could be seen for 5 kilo meters either side of the Harbour Bridge.

The Pacific may not be a metropolis like Sydney but, according to experts, there is a much bigger risk of a major oil spill than peo

ple realise.

Many fuel storage facilities are situated in, or near, harbouis around which the capital cities of the region are built and their sys tems are as vulnerable to human error as Sydney’s were.

None of the ports, to my knowledge, have land-based dumping facilities in which fishing fleets or general shipping can dump their waste oil, resulting in much of it being dumped, sometimes illegal ly, into harbours or the ocean outside. There is an ever-present risk of ships hitting reefs and, it is here, that much of the hidden risk is located. Each year thousands of enormous vessels criss-cross the Pacific without putting ashore. They travel from Australia to the west coast of the United States, from South America to Asia and

from Australia to Japan.

The Sydney spill of 300,000 litres, or 300 tonnes, was just a fraction of the size of that of the infamous Exxon Valdez, in Alas ka - it tipped 40,000 tonnes of black gunge onto the coastline with horrendous results. According to Steve Raymaker, marine pollution expert at SPREP (the South Pacific Environment Program) in Apia, the Pacific could easily face an oil spill more than 30 times the size of the one in Sydney.

The impact on people, so many of whom rely on the sea for their food, would be much worse than elsewhere and such a spill could easily have disastrous repercussions for the tourist industry.

The potential has already been glimpsed in some places. In Honiara, in May 1998, a hole in a Shell storage tank about the size of a 20 cent coin resulted in 250,000 litres of gasoline escaping onto the surface of the harbour. It took 5 days for Shell to realise it had a problem. The risk with gasoline is fire rather than long-term environmental damage. In Honiara boats at their moorings were surrounded by gasoline. As one observer put it, with one spark ‘we could have had a barbecue on the harbour’. v At the moment, experts agree, the Pacific is totally unprepared to deal with major oil spills. Even in places such as Suva, which has an emergency plan, a lead agency ready to take charge of con tainment operations and some equipment, a major spill would be overwhelming. Obviously, the best way of dealing with oil spills is prevention. Nothing is foolproof but financial incentive can have a big impact.

Before Laura D’Amato left Sydney it had to post an $8 million bond to pay for the clean-up and fines for creating the problem in the first place. In Honiara, Shell did not have to pay a cent for a similar sized leak. Since then, Solomon Islandsr, Samoa and Niue have wised-up to this problem and within the next few months are likely to have comprehensive marine pollution legislation in place that will impose appropriate penalties on polluters.

The legislation, which is available as a draft, is part of a major program being run by SPREP to upgrade the Pacific Islands’ abili ty to respond to oil spills.A regional emergency plan - called Pac plan - is almost finalised and assistance is available to help nation al governments develop their own marine pollution contingency

plan.

SPREP is undertaking a major marine pollution risk assessment that will tell us which reefs are most vulnerable to cross-Pacific traffic.

It is also organising surveillance of ships on the high seas by piggy-backing on the surveillance conducted by Australian, New Zealand and French airforce planes for the Forum Fisheries Agency. Some disasters cannot be prevented but the world is now on notice that the Pacific takes the threat of marine pollution seri ously. With any luck, the number of accidents caused by human carelessness, a major contributor to oil spill pollution, will be reduced. ■

Jemima Garrett