Friday February 26: Sea Alarm put an assessment team on stand by in order to travel to Italy and assist with the initiation of an oiled wildlife response, at the request of the Italian authorities. In the morning Sea Alarm was alerted by Ezio Amato, a scientist and emergency response specialist of ICRAM, the Central Institute for Applied Scientific Research of the Sea, who asked if Sea Alarm would be prepared to assist in the developing incident.
We were very sad to hear that on 20 February Melina Mosch passed away after losing a long lasting battle against cancer; she was only 28 years of age. Despite her illness, which was diagnosed two years ago, Melina took any opportunity to continue doing what she thought was her main call and drive: saving the lives of animals.
During a recent visit to Helsinki in the framework of HELCOM Response, Sea Alarm’s Hugo Nijkamp met with Vesa Numinen and Tomi Rask of the Helsinki City Rescue Department (HCRD) to discuss oiled wildlife response preparedness.
During his recent visit to Helsinki, Hugo Nijkamp gave a two hour lecture to more than 30 volunteers of WWF Finland. The volunteers are trained to assist in oil spill incidents in Finland where they play a main role in the shoreline cleanup and wildlife response, as part of a programme which is coordinated by WWF Finland, in close cooperation with Finland’s National Environmental Institute (SYKE) and the Rescue Departments.
Sea Alarm are delighted to have been granted observed official observer status at HELCOM, which was agreed at the Helsinki Commission meeting in Helsinki on 4-5 March 2010.
Sea Alarm attended the 12th HELCOM RESPONSE meeting on 17-19 February in Helsinki. During this meeting the Response Group approved a formal HELCOM recommendation on wildlife preparedness and response, prepared by Sea Alarm, Estonia and WWF Finland.
Sea Alarm has been invited to assist the Belgian authorities to set up and run an exercise to test the Belgian Oiled Bird Response Plan and in particular the role of the Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend (WRCO). It is the second time that the plan will be tested and the second time that Sea Alarm will be involved in the design of the exercise.
Sea Alarm will continue to assist the Netherlands in 2010 with maintaining their national preparedness for oiled wildlife incidents. An important activity scheduled for this year is a tabletop exercise to test the function of the key roles in the plan’s crisis committee, which is responsible for setting up and running the temporary oiled wildlife rehabilitation centre during an incident.
Since EMPOWER membership was opened in November 2009, applications to join the network are starting to roll into Sea Alarm’s mailbox.
The Weidefeld Tierschutzzentrum (animal welfare centre) recently had the opportunity to send two of its staff (Katrin Umlauf, director and Katharina Stockem) to Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend (WRCO) to improve their hands on skills in rehabilitation of oiled birds.
Authorities in Estonia, Finland and Sweden have launched the EnSaCo Oil Spill Project, which aims to strengthen cross-border oiled wildlife and shoreline response, for easier transfer of resources between countries during an incident.
On December 16 last year a delegation from Lower Saxony paid an informal visit to the Netherlands to discuss planning for oiled wildlife response. The three person German delegation, all working for the Animal Health and Veterinary Task Force, was led by Josef Huesmann, who is responsible for developing an oiled wildlife response plan for Lower Saxony. Its mission was to learn more about the recently agreed Dutch response plan for oiled wildlife and from the representatives from Rijkswaterstaat who developed that plan.