Sea Alarm was invited to make a presentation at the 1st Adriatic oil spill conference organised by OSEC, which took place on 12-14 May in Opatija, Croatia. This was the first regional conference of this kind and brought together stakeholders and experts in oil spill response from all six countries bordering the Adriatic – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Italy, Montenegro and Slovenia.
Sea Alarm was invited to attend a stakeholder consultation meeting at the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) on 5 March in Lisbon, Portugal. EMSA is an EU agency working towards safer and cleaner shipping and has a multi-annual programme dedicated to preparedness and response to pollution at sea from ships.
It is not unusual that from time to time seabirds are washed ashore covered in substances that apparently have killed them, but that look strange and sometimes potentially dangerous. In the Netherlands, where beaches are intensively and systematically monitored for scientific purposes, these events do not pass unnoticed. Last March seabirds were found in large numbers on the shores of the northwest Dutch coast covered in a substance that looked like glue.
Five days after the Full City grounded in Norway on 31 July, things are falling into place for the wildlife response. The Norwegian Oiled Wildlife Response Network (NOW) is taking a strong lead in the organisation and coordination of the response. The Network’s activities have been recognised and approved by the authorities, resulting in the wildlife response being fully integrated into the overall oil spill response. A budget has been made available to NOW to cover the costs of the response.
“It is incredible how quickly and well things are getting organised here in Norway” says Sea Alarm’s Roser Gasol, who has been on-site since 2 August. “Everybody works so effectively together that each hour you see incredible changes. The rehabilitation centre in Langesund will soon be up and running, providing the desired capacity of at least 180 birds”.
Sea Alarm”s Roser Gasol travelled to Norway to respond to an oil spill caused by the Panamese bulk carrier MS Full City. The ship stranded in the early hours of 31 July on skerries near Langesund, county Telemark, in southern Norway following a storm. The Full City had 1120 tons of bunker oil on board of which a thousand tons have spilled into the sea.
The spill occurred in an area where several nature reserves are present, and at this time of year, is an important area for eiders, scoters, terns, cormorants and several gull species.
Sea Alarm is pleased to announce that together with the Estonian Fund for Nature and Oil Spill Response, it will host the 10th edition of the Effects of Oil on Wildlife Conference (EOW) in 2009. The Conference will be organised in close cooperation with the founders of the Conference series, the International Bird Rescue and Research Centre and Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research Centre, and will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 5th to 9th October, 2009.
Since early 2005, Sea Alarm has been working to set up a global database on oiled wildife preparedness and response as part of its cooperation with Oil Spill Response. The database includes so called Country Wildlife Response Profiles, which are descriptions of the arrangements that are in place in coastal countries to deal with marine wildlife emergencies. In 2008 Sea Alarm added another 18 countries to its database, which now includes over 60 countries.
Today we came across a short video which shows that clean-up activities are taking place and that workers also find oiled birds on the shore (http://www.greenpeace.org/russia/rus/1531282). More details are found at these sites: Black Sea Oil Spill Effects to Last…
It is still hard to get information from local organisations in the area of the incident. All relevant international organisations that we contacted so far seem to be facing this problem, so at the moment the international media are also…
Sunday 11 November 2007, immediately after media reports appeared, the Black Sea information sheet on vulnerable bird populations was updated at the www.oiledwildlife.eu website, or read the information sheet directly here (see Section 4.2 Technical documents).