Thousands of volunteers — students and professionals — pitched in to help the authorities clean the oil that swept onto the beaches of Chennai on the morning of January 29, 2017, a day after two ships collided off Ennore. Officials across agencies too were coordinating, deciding on the fly what needed to be done and how to work around bureaucratic turfs to execute the clean-up operation.
By the end of April, the clean-up was declared complete. Following extensive surveys, levels of pollutants in the sea and the shore were declared within safe limits.
While these were the positives, a review of reports submitted by the various agencies involved — the Directorate General of Shipping, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests, the State Department of Environment — documents submitted to the National Green Tribunal (NGT), and interviews with a cross-section of stakeholders and experts show that there were a series of missteps and several mistakes in the clean-up.
Damage underestimated
Officials of the Coast Guard, the nodal agency tasked with containing and mitigating an oil spill on the coast, have blamed the crew of Dawn Kancheepuram, who initially reported that only two tonnes of fuel oil had spilled. Apparently, they had not realised that one more large tank in the ship, containing fuel oil, had been breached during the collision and some 250 tonnes of fuel oil had leaked. This resulted in a delay in launching the larger clean-up operation required which, in turn, contributed to much of the oil reaching the shores.
Coast Guard and Port officials say they did all they could, under the circumstances. For instance, temporary containment barriers, called booms, were laid around the ship some three-and-half hours after the collision, but it did not have the desired impact.
The officials believe that the heavy fuel oil that leaked out initially sank, making it invisible, only to resurface the next day. This caught them off guard, Coast Guard officials have said. Other officials also believe the heavier components of the ship’s fuel oil sank onto the seabed.
Experts say that heavy fuel oil is indeed more dense than crude oil and its behaviour, if spilled into the sea, over a period of time has been the subject of many studies. “In my observation, however, we did not find any sunken oil after the spill,” said Prabhakar Clement, professor at Auburn University, in Alabama, who was among the team of researchers that studied the spill.
Questionable dispersants
The Coast Guard sprayed more than 12,000 litres of oil spill dispersant (OSD), but it was likely too late to make an impact. The use of dispersants has been the subject of much controversy worldwide. The criticism is that while the OSD dilutes and disperses the oil, making it invisible, it does not quite make it go away. Several experts have instead called for the natural process of evaporation of the components of the oil under the sun and eventual decomposition of the remaining oil.
Further, OSDs are toxic chemicals and can be harmful to life. A few argue that if the spill is small enough, like it was in Chennai, the best course is to spray OSD and leave it to the ocean to take care of it, instead of having the oil come to the shore in a concentrated form.
On the shore, mechanical devices like pumps, skimmers and super suckers were used initially to remove the oil but they were not successful. Most experts conclude that manually removing the oil was the only option after it reached the shore.
Those doing the clean-up, including the volunteers, formed a human chain to manually carry the oil they scooped out, all the way down the groynes and onto the road to large collection tanks. In that process, they spilled oil on the boulders and rocks.
Manual scrubbing
Starting on February 10, the secondary respondents — led by professionals deployed by the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation — took until the end of April to scrub all the oil away. “We used high-pressure jets, high volume pumps as well as absorbent booms to remove the oil and collect it. Much manual scrubbing of the boulders was also done,” says Neel J. Nair, who was co-ordinating the secondary clean-up.
Perhaps the biggest lesson, however, is that nearly 20 years after the national oil spill disaster contingency plan had been approved, Tamil Nadu did not have a local oil spill removal plan in place. In the absence of such a plan, chaos often reigned during the Chennai clean-up. A prime example was confusion and the time lost in deciding how best to remove the oil that had come to the beaches, and oil being spilled on the rocks while being transported to tanks.
Further, as per documents submitted to the NGT, the State government and its agencies swung into action only on January 31 evening — a full three and a half days after the collision. Until then, communications were being sent between various agencies, citing media reports and calling for a clean-up operation. Three days after the oil washed up, State officials assembled at the site for the first time in an organised manner. Until then it was largely a handful of Coast Guard and Pollution Control Board officials and volunteers.
“The national plan only lays down the broad structure. The local plans should spell out how exactly the clean-up should be carried out,” says Mr. Nair.
