With the ship’s salvage taking more than two days and authorities failing to clean up the spill – now spread over an 80km swathe of the Sundarbans – in over five days, the first of what is expected to be a myriad of dolphin corpses came to the surface yesterday.
Dhaka Tribune photojournalist Syed Zakir Hossain, who has covered a wide area of the forest in the last 24 hours, located the first dead body of an Irrawaddy dolphin in the Harintana-Tambulbunia channel of the Sela River yesterday, some 25km from where the tanker capsized.
Since the Sela River is a sanctuary of two types of dolphins, a major concern after the tanker capsized and went down with over 350,000 litres of oil was the well-being of these sensitive and rare marine creatures.
Reports of sightings of corpses of other wild animals were already coming in on Friday, but this is the first confirmed sighting of dolphin remains.
But the Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan was reported by BSS as saying: “I have discussed with the experts and they said that there will be no major damage.”
“It will not affect dolphins and other animals as the oil has not spread that much,” UNB quoted the minister as saying on a visit to Chandpai in the Sundarbans.
Monirul H Khan, professor of zoology at Jahangirnagar University, told the Dhaka Tribune: “Generally, dolphin corpses do not come to the water surface. The fact that one of them has floated to the surface should mean a number of dolphins have been directly affected.”
He said: “If large creatures such as dolphins could not survive, then smaller ones like otters and fish are in much bigger danger.”
However, Zahhidul Kabir, divisional forest officer in the Sundarbans, claimed that so far they had not found anything other than the dead bodies of some small fish and crabs which, he said, could not be linked to the oil spill.
There are three dolphin sanctuaries – Chandpai, Dhangimari and Dudhmukhi – across 33km of the Sundarbans. Of them, Chandpai is the largest, covering 15km of the Sela River.
A Dhaka Tribune team which has been patrolling the area for three days did not see a single dolphin in the Chandpai sanctuary near where the tanker sank.
However, in Dhangimari sanctuary they counted 13 dolphin sightings in five minutes, though they could not determine the number of individual animals present.
Oil tanker Southern Star 7, carrying 357,664 litres of furnace oil, sank in the river at Mrigamari under the East Zone of the Sundarbans after being hit by a cargo vessel around 6am on Tuesday.
The Mess
When the vessel was salvaged after two days, nearly two-thirds of the oil it was carrying had spilled into the river and, propelled by the forces of high and low coastal tides, spread over at least an 80km range of the mangrove forest.
The authorities have two options to remove the oil from the water – by using chemical dispersants or oil-consuming bacteria. But they could not be sure about the environmental impact of the first option and the second had to be imported.
As a result, no effective measures have so far been taken to remove the oil. Instead, local people have been encouraged to manually collect the oil from the water.
Brian D Smith and Rubaiyat Mansur, experts at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said: “Chemical dispersants should not be used without consulting international experts with oil spill experience in mangrove forests. Dispersants are typically used in oceanic waters to prevent the slick from reaching the shore.”
The immediate toxic effect on terrestrial and aquatic wildlife can lead to death or reduced reproductive fitness. Long-term effects may pose a risk to the aquatic ecology due to chronic exposure to oil toxins and fouling due to the retention of oil clumps in woody debris and vegetation and oil seeping into sediments through crab holes, they said.
They predict the die-off of small mangrove trees near the waterline in the next few months and larger trees in the next few years or longer especially if trees become re-exposed to oil seeping out of sediments, UNB reported.
The impacts on the larger ecology of the mangrove system as small and large trees die-off, will be soil erosion and excessive sediments deposited into small and large channels.
Potential toxic impacts to local human communities are likely from exposure to oil during clean-up operations or by consuming fish exposed to oil.
“Short-term impacts of the oil spill will be severe as the habitat of the affected areas will be damaged. Animals and fish species will lose their breeding grounds,” former director of Water Resources Planning Organization (WARPO) Engineer Inamul Haque told UNB.
The clean up
The disaster, the fall-out of which has so far proven to be overwhelming, appears to have shown that the authorities have neither the capacity nor the experience to tackle it.
The Forest Department yesterday engaged 200 day-labourers with 100 boats to scoop the oil from the waters of the river and adjoining canals.
As of yesterday afternoon, Padma Oil Company, the owner of the oil, had collected just 10,000 litres from locals cleaning up the massive oil spill. They are offering the public Tk30 per litre of recovered oil.
Ecology and biodiversity researcher Pavel Partha, who is currently visiting the area, told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday: “Engaging untrained locals in collecting the oil is also likely to turn out to be a boomerang. Along with oil, they are also collecting a lot of mud from the river banks. This may harm the composition of the soil and end up harming the regeneration of the forest ecosystem.”
The Dhaka Tribune journalists have also noticed many mud-skippers and marine birds such as the maasranga trapped in the furnace oil-contaminated mud.
Zoology Professor Monirul also said: “A large number of dolphins may have migrated from the area by now. They probably suffered breathing problems because the contamination should have significantly lowered the level of dissolved oxygen in the water.”
The route that the sunken tanker was following was off limits to large vessels because it is within the dolphin sanctuary. But because the allowed route had become unusable due to poor navigability three years ago, these vessels have been plying these waters.
Researchers and environmentalists have long warned of the consequences of poor enforcement of rules and laws.
Voicing concern over the oil tanker crash, UNDP Bangladesh Country Director Pauline Tamesis said the accident highlights the need for a complete ban on the movement of all commercial vessels through the Sundarbans, UNB reported yesterday.
“Global experience shows that this kind of incident has long term environmental consequences and it requires coordinated multi-sectoral efforts to restore the affected areas,” she said.
