It has been more than two weeks since two tankers collided off Chennai spilling oil into the coastline. Though the authorities are working round the clock to contain the damage, it will be weeks before things normalise. The reason, KUMAR CHEllAPPAN says, is lack of proper cleaning equipment and an inadequate action plan in a city that has the second longest coastline in the country
Si vis pacem, para bellum
— Vegetius, a scholar believed to have lived in the Roman Empire in the 5th Century
It means that if you want peace, prepare for war. The phrase which finds mention in De Re Militari has been used effectively by statesmen and generals. But is there a phrase which says that if you want safety and security, be prepared for disastersIJ One can never call a nation armed to the teeth as a war monger. Your enemies will respect you only if you are well-armed and well-protected.
Same is the case with natural or man-made disasters. The worst disaster faced by south India in modern times was the December 2004 Tsunami which struck the coasts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala claiming the lives of thousands. India was thoroughly unprepared for it which was the fall out of an earthquake of magnitude 9 in the Richter scale with its epicentre in the Indian Ocean.
But in the next two years, scientists of the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services perfected a technology with which the possibilities of Tsunami could be forecasted well in advance.
Today, India is the Regional Tsunami Warning Centre for all the countries lying along the rim of the Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
The satellites launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation help meteorologists to forecast with precision the possibility of cyclones, sea swells and deforestation of any kind happening in the nook and corner of the country.
Chinks in the armour become visible only when the country is struck with disasters of all kinds. This became evident on January 28, 2017 when two tanker ships collided 4 km off Chennai’s Kamarajar Port resulting in spillage of Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO), a fuel used to run the ship.
The spill was caused by human error, if reports coming from various sources are true. Even after a week of fire fighting by the Coast Guard, the leaked oil is spreading all over the Chennai coast.
The Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) in its latest report has said that till Wednesday night (February 8, 2017), a 52-km stretch along the Chennai coast has been polluted by the spill. This information is based on “Oil Spill Trajectory Model” run by the scientists of the INCOIS.
The collision between the two ships, BW Maple (Isle of Man flagged vessel) and MT Dawn Kancheepuram (India flagged vessel) occurred at 4 am on January 28. Maple had departed from Kamarajar Port after off loading its cargo of liquified Petroleum Gas and it was on its way to Visakahapattanam. MT Dawn was entering the Kamarajar Port with a load of petroleum oil and lubricants.
Maple was sailing through the channel connecting the port to the high seas. When the ship was 3.7 km away from the shore, Vinod Sahadevan, the Kamarajar Port pilot who was directing the ship through the narrow channel got down and boarded his boat to return to this work station. The ship had to cover some more distance through the channel before entering the high seas. But the port authorities had allowed MT Dawn to enter the channel much before Maple cleared the channel.
Navigators of Dawn were being directed by the port officials how to sail safely through the channel when they caught sight of Maple approaching their ship. Though they scurried to avoid a collision, it was too late, according to a senior official in Kamarajar Port who was following the development.
The channel from Kamarajar Port which leads to the high seas has a turning at the exit point. The ships leaving the port have to take a left turn to enter the Indian high seas. The cardinal law is that ships leaving the port should give way to inbound vessels before venturing out into the high seas. This means that Maple should have given way to Dawn before it could move through the channel. But Maple, in true Tamilian style, went ahead and crashed against Dawn.
A veteran pilot, told The Pioneer that there has been no communication between the vessels. “The thumb rule is that officials of the inbound and outgoing ships should communicate with each other. This collision is the result of no communication between the ships,” Captain Subash Kumar, advisor, port trusts tells you.
The collision itself was a major disaster. The Bulbous Bow, made of solid steel at the bottom of the front of the ship (bow), described as the strongest part of the ship, bore into Dawn like a sharp knife. It is only when one understands that the Bulbous Bow has been designed to cut through water, reduce drag and improve fuel efficiency of the ship, one can understand the impact of the collision.
Maple’s Bulbous Bow is said to have pierced through Dawn’s duck, ballast tank and fuel tanks. Maple was moving in a direction perpendicular to that of Dawn and hence the damage . Maple cut through the fuel oil pipelines of Dawn which resulted in the heavy fuel oil leakage. The real story revealing the inefficiency and inexperience and under preparedness of the agencies responsible for preventing the spread of oil spills begin from this point.
Officials in Kamarajar Port claimed only one tonne oil leaked into the sea following the collision. Three days after the collision, morning walkers in the beautiful Marina Beach were taken aback when they saw heavy black deposits of oil on the sand. “There was blackish oil floating around,” Dr Naditha Krishna, an environmentalist says.
It took another three days for the authorities to officially accept the truth that there had been an oil spill. By this time, the scientists of the INCOIS who set in motion their Oil Spill Trajectory Model concluded that the oil spill has spread to 29 km along the Chennai coast. The INCOIS also said that based on the size of oil plumes and sludge, no less than 20 tonnes of oil had leaked into the sea following the collision.
The Indian Coast Guard’s Inspector General Rajan Bargotra, said on February 3, 2017 that the Port authorities informed the Coast Guard about the oil spill a god three hours after the incident. “We were alerted about the oil spill at 6.30 am while the accident is reported to have happened at 4 am. The furnace oil and sludge from Dawn Kancheepuram had got discharged into the sea following the collision. The oil leak was detected by the Vessel Traffic Management System only by morning,” Bargotra says.
The Coast Guard authorities claim that they launched the clean- up operation immediately after receiving the information about the spill. It was then the thorough inefficiency and incapability of the agencies to undertake such a massive operation came out in the open. Two submersible pumps used by the Coast Guard to remove oil sludge broke down. The Kamarajar Port exposed its weakness: The port has no mechanism in place to prevent the oil spill which happened right under its nose.
Two days after the accident, ecological experts had cautioned the authorities that what the port officials counted as a minor accident would end up as a major disaster with future ecological impact. Journalists who were taken out to the sea by the Coast Guard officials were shocked to see the kind of cleaning operation in progress: “They are using mugs, buckets, rubber gloves and gumboots… all primitive equipment in this era of satellite phones and ultra modern engineering products capable of sucking the oil out of the sea.
Buckets were being used to scoop out the heavy fuel oil. Hundreds of concerned citizens came forward offering voluntary service to help the coast guards in the cleaning operations. They were seen manually transferring the buckets filled with oil sludge to 1,000 litres tankers parked by the beach side. The Coast Guard Pollution Response Team used spades, mugs, buckets to remove the oil slick. The process is continuing even at the time this story went to Press and it may take weeks before the slick can be removed.
The National Green Tribunal, which took note of the oil spill following complaints by hundreds of fishermen that their livelihood was at stake, could not get a proper answer to the query how much oil had leaked into the sea. Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board, entrusted with the task of monitoring the coastline expressed their helplessness to the NGTB. It told the NGT that till February 3, the coast guard had removed 72 tonne oil slick from the sea. Asked about the quantity of oil spilled into the sea, the PCB feigned ignorance. The officials of the Kamarajar Port told the tribunal that 20 tonnes oil has been spilled. But they were silent when the tribunal countered them with the question that how come 72 tonnes oil slick was removed if there was spillage of only 20 tonnes.
One more truth came out during the hearing. The super suckers and submersible machines deployed for the clean-up operations were ineffective. Fishermen staying along the Chennai shoreline were seen removing the oil sludge with bare hands and no shoes. Since the discharged oil had a rich content of benzene, it could lead to several health problems later on.
Jayapalayan, a marine engineer-turned-environment activist who is also the president of South India Fishermen’s Federation tells you that all safety measures have been violated by the officials at ground zero. “This is a man-made disaster arising out of irresponsibility and callous attitude of port officials as well as that of the agency responsible for checking the spread of oil spillage,” Jayapalayan says.
He tells you that standard operation procedures have been blatantly violated which resulted in the spilled oil leaking to distance of more than 50 km. “The entire sand along Chennai shore has been contaminated with oil. We do not have facilities or a system to clean the oil or cordon off the area where the spillage has happened,” he says.
Experts tells you that the contaminated sand was being transported to Ennore near Chennai where it would be subjected to the process of bio-remediation. “This is an operation in which bacteria developed by us would be released to the oil-polluted sand. The bacteria would swallow the contaminated portion (the chemical fixed to the sand) over a period of six to eight months,” a Kamarajar Port official says.
One is told that there is a silver lining to this spillage. Since the oil spillage occurred close to the shore, the damage or pollution caused is the minimum. Had it happened some more distance away from the port, the result would have been disastrous.
Though the officials are tight lipped over the quantity of oil spilled from Dawn, The Pioneer was told by a senior Kamarajar Port official that 100 tonnes of bunker oil has been discharged into the sea.
Tamil Nadu’s Fisheries Minister D Jayakumar claimed that the State has suffered a loss of `120 crore due to the oil spill. He has not given furnished any data based on which he arrived at the figure. The fish caught off Chennai coast remained unsold which caused hardship to the fishing community in the region. But no widespread damage has been caused by the spill, according to marine scientists. “This claim is something like the `25,000 crore compensation claimed by Chief Minister O Panneerselvam following the cyclone Varda which hit Tamil Nadu in early 2017,” Jayapalayan says. He pointed out that neither the Minister nor the port authorities have any idea about the quantity of oil spilled, they are up to date on the losses suffered by the people and the compensation to be claimed from the Centre or other agencies.
Systemic failure is cited as the reason for the collision between the two ships and also the inefficiency of the concerned agencies to prevent the spreading of the leaked oil. It is said that there is a National Oil Spill Disaster Contingency Plan formulated at the national level. But Tamil Nadu and more importantly its capital is yet to hear of such an action plan. This, when the State has one of the longest coastlines in the country!
Adding insult to injury is the fact that there is no response protocol or standard operating procedures (SoP) or a contingency plan in Tamil Nadu to counter oil spills or disasters of this kind. All major ports in the country were asked to prepare a plan for themselves and State Maritime Boards were asked to formulate a comprehensive action plan for all ports in the State. In Tamil Nadu, port authorities have not heard anything of this kind.
But there are some people laughing all the way to the bank — the NGOs which are focussing on environment and ecological issues. Come any disaster, it was time for them to swoop down. They have claimed that more than 20 Olive Ridley tortoises have died because of the oil spill and this was reported widely in the media. The fact is that no tortoise was killed because of the oil spill as they were far away from the shoreline. But the NGOs got their moment of publicity which would help them to get more funds from abroad as well as Central Government agencies.
The task before the agencies probing the collision as well as the oil spill is to zero in on the factors which led to the ship leaving the port and colliding onto the incoming vessel and also the reason behind the pilot of the outbound ship getting down much before the ship reached the high seas.
“Whether it be floods, drought, tsunami, or marine pollution, Tamil Nadu has no response protocol or SoP in place. It is the Central Forces which rush to the rescue and are part of the relief and rescue operations. The State should have an action plan which should be executed by the local people who are familiar with the region,” Nanditha Krishna, winner of Indira Gandhi Paryavaran Puraskar, the country’s top honour for environmental protection, tells you.
This lacuna has to be rectified immediately. If not whosoever is the Chief Minister, they can fly to New Delhi seeking assistance. We need a concrete action plan and SoP in place and officials should be earmarked to implement them. Chennai was lucky this time because the spot of the spill was at a safe distance. Had it been slightly far away where the currents are strong, the entire State’s coast would have turned black and marine life gone forever!