Tar balls — blobs of petroleum — are washing up again on the 105-km Goa coastline, an almost yearly problem confronting the fishing community and tourism stakeholders in the State. Officials and scientists believe that oil spillage from tankers sailing on international shipping lines has been causing the environmental hazard.
Fisheries officials said tar balls were washed ashore in bulk at Khariwada in Mormugao on Wednesday morning. Early this week, the Coast Guard conducted sorties to Khariwada, Baina, Bogmalo, Cansaulim, Velsao, Majorda, Colva and other beaches in Mormugao taluk to trace their source.
Tourism Director Nikhil Desai told The Hindu that tar balls had been threatening the ecosystem and beauty of the beaches. It was, however, not a new occurrence.
Fisheries officials quoted Coast Guard sources as saying that tar balls were washed ashore during the pre- and post-monsoon period along the Konkan belt, including Goa, Karwar in Karnataka and south Ratnagiri in Maharashtra.
S.W.A. Naqvi, Director, National Institute of Oceanography, told The Hindu that tar balls had been washed ashore practically every year since the 1970s. The institute’s studies had suggested offshore oil spillage as the obvious reason. “We believe it is not local pollution,” he said.
Vethamony P. and other NIO researchers have said in their studies that the only source of the problem was oil spillage or tanker wash.
Mr. Desai said that since the Tourism Department could not control the source, it had been struggling to put in place an integrated system to tackle the menace quickly and in a systematic way for the past four or five months. A proposal for such a system has been pending before the Finance Department.
He said the manual cleaning of the beach now being done was woefully inadequate to solve the problem. The proposal, estimated at Rs. 18 crore a year, moots formation of an agency equipped to pick and transport tar balls, stack them, and prepare and fill composite pits to ensure that no trace of the pollutant remained.
