SAVE THE LIVING SEA: OIL & CHEMICALS

A Marine Bill is currently being considered by Parliament - not before time! Ninety-five per cent of the world's trade by weight is carried on the sea. It is essential that the chief users of the sea - seafarers, their trade unions, shipping companies, operators, charterers agents insurers, port owners and inspectors - are included in the consultations on this measure.

A few large land based environmental organisations have succeeded in forcing the government to focus on marine problems. Because their own experience is of the land, their proposals are for protection of Sites of Scientific Interest on the sea-bed, not for the sea: they were given priority. Now the fisheries, which were specifically excluded, are included. Parliament is not going to legislate again soon on protection of the marine environment.
All pollution threats to it must be brought within the scope of this Marine Bill.

One of the worst pollutants is - OIL. It is one of the main cargoes because of our huge demand for it. Above all, however, all vessels, like cars, large and small, use oil as fuel. When it loses its efficacy what happens to it? There are no convenient garages on the high seas.

How, then, do crews dispose of it? The Save Our Seabirds Trust, operating along the south east Channel coast, is well aware of its harmful impact on seabirds and the rest of the marine ecology. The Channel is a black spot because it is one of the busiest seaways in the world. Some 500 ships pass through it daily.

Almost every kind of seabird - migrants like fulmars, kittiwakes, terns, great northern divers, as well as shags, cormorants, shearwaters and the wide variety of gulls, who live on our coasts, is found oiled.

When there were fewer of us on the planet, before the era of mass consumption of oil, the great eco-system of the sea could tolerate our using it as a rubbish dump and cesspool. Now, within a little over a century we are threatening many of its innumerable life forms with extinction with our pollutants.

Nearly a third of all energy used in the U.K. comes from OIL!

Over 2 billion tonnes of goods are moved around the U.K. every year. Fifty Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) are required to transport 1,000 tonnes - but only a single typical freight train.

Rail freight produces 90 per cent less carbon dioxide per tonne carried than road transport.
HGVs carry 65 per cent of goods transported annually: rail freight only 7 per cent.

	FOR 1 LITRE OF OIL A double-decker bus provides 5 times the carrying capacity of the average private car.
	If your family owns a car or van, what kind of fuel do they burn in it? Where does it come from?

During the 1939-45 war, there was much less petrol available in Britain because of enemy action against shipping. Obviously priority in supplies was given to the armed forces, munitions and other factories and the medical, fire, and police services. Civilians who could prove they needed to run vehicles to carry on their businesses or jobs, had to apply for special licences; but most managed with public transport.

We use oil for mass production of every day items, many of them, not so long ago made from non-polluting sources and long-lasting: oil for cleaning equipment and materials, packaging and over-packaging because of an excessive fixation on hygiene, buildings, furniture, furnishings, clothing toiletries, and etc.

We could drastically reduce our dependence on oil now and cut suffering and destruction of much marine wildlife. That means changing habits and attitudes which takes a very long time. However, it must be done if we are to preserve our planet. Life on earth depends on a healthy, living sea.

DID YOU KNOW IT IS UNLAWFUL TO DISPOSE OF WASTE OIL BY POURING IT DOWN A DRAIN OR LAVATORY?

WHAT OIL DOES TO THE ECOLOGY OF THE SEA, NOTABLY SEABIRDS

Every creature living in the sea depends directly or indirectly on the millions of tiny plants and animals commonly known as plankton which produce far more oxygen than plants on land and which live only on the surface where there is most light. Zoo or animal plankton live on plant or phyto plankton; larger fish and the largest of all mammals, whales, live on zoo plankton or krill.

Oil destroys plankton so it destroys the first link in the great chain of marine life.

The oil may float on top of the sea, that is it may be a slick. The plankton live right on the surface of the sea so they are bound to be caught in it. It may get mixed up with the sea water to form a mousse.

Do the auks and other diving birds, who come inshore for summer to nest and raise chicks on cliffs dive into oil patches and slicks: or do they come up into them? We don't know. Fewer gulls are caught in oil because they spend a lot of time in inshore waters and even on land in their search for food; there is less oil about close to the shore.

By kind permission of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The RSPCA is the National Body which cares for injured seabirds, not the RSPB as some people think: the RSPB is concerned with the protection of whole species from extinction rather than injuries to individual birds.

We do not know the exact totals of birds hurt and killed in a year because carers are so busy looking after them they often do not bother to keep up their records and others do not hand in figures.

The Care and Rehabilitation of Oiled Birds:
The care and rehabilitation of oiled birds is a lengthy and delicate business. IT SHOULD NEVER BE UNDERTAKEN BY ANY UNTRAINED PERSON. The main damage is not the oil on a bird's feathers; it is internal.

Well-meaning and inexperienced members of the public see only dirty, oily bedraggled birds and usually think that a good wash in the sink to make them look clean is all that is required. They do not realise that these birds are poisoned! The birds try to clean the oil off themselves by the usual preening and so eat it and poison themselves. The oil literally burns up their vital organs: stomach, liver, intestines - anything it reaches. Flemish specialists in bird care confirmed the severe damage caused by oil to birds' internal organs. If left untreated or if merely washed by someone who thinks that is all that is necessary they are condemned to a slow and horribly painful death. Their first need therefore is not a wash but a rest and an antidote to the poison. All along the South East Coast carers have been distressed to have birds brought in to them which have been inexpertly cleaned. Almost all of them die.

There has been controversy as to whether a bird once oiled ever recovers following the publication of B.E. Sharp's 1996 study of survival rates of guillemots who were victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off the north west coast of America. He claimed that few of them recovered, hardly surprising since TV coverage only showed people washing their feathers. The British Trust for Ornithology accepted this report, but happily along with the RSPCA decided on the need for further research. The only valid source of information are the dates on ringed birds found after they had been released back into the wild. The RSPCA had been ringing birds but now began to review its methods of rehabilitating them. However, the South Devon Seabirds Trust in Teignmouth had also been ringing birds from 1993 in order to discourage unnecessary euthanasia of oiled guillemots which was encouraged by Sharp's study. There was a marked difference in evidence from their rings and those of the BTO and RSPCA:-

The South Devon Trust challenged received ideas and concluded that the latitudes where a ringed bird was found, age and sex as well as the weight and general condition of a bird had to be taken into account. It found that pneumonia-related deaths were a major cause of the poor survival rates shown in the RSPCA's first study. The South Devon Trust has ringed 1,000 birds and is monitoring results over ten years or more; it is also taking into account results from other independent carers' ringed oiled birds. The Trust's birds have been found in Sweden, Norway, Shetland, Holland, Anglesey, France and the breeding colony in Skomer.

Members of the public can give considerable help, however. They can collect injured birds off beaches, very difficult in the case of oiled birds. In great distress, they are easily frightened if not approached correctly and run very fast back into the sea; once in the sea, they are beyond help.

When caught great care must be taken to avoid being stabbed by the very long, sharp beaks of birds like guillemots; birds with shorter beaks, like gulls and razorbills tend to grab and twist e.g. a person's nose - also very painful. In all cases collectors should be very careful to keep beaks well away from their eyes.

A surprising number of people do manage to pick them up and take them to a collecting point or even transport them to an expert care centre.* The best way of transporting them is in a deep cardboard box with a fold-over lid, e.g. a greengrocer's fruit or vegetable carton, which should be lined with thick newspaper. They will usually quieten down. People can negotiate with their local Beach Inspectors to have a small stock of suitable boxes and newspaper kept near the seafront.

* The chief expert care centres on the South East Coast are the RSPCA Mallydams Wildlife Education Centre, Peter James Lane, Fairlight, Nr. Hastings TN35 4AH. Tel: 01424 812055 which runs an 'oiled bird course' for adults and Brent Lodge Bird and Wildlife Hospital, Cow Lane, Sidlesham, Nr. Chichester PO20 7LN. Tel: 01243 641672. The RSPCA Unit at Patcham - The Animal Centre, London Road, Patcham, Nr. Brighton. Tel: 01273 554218, acts as a holding centre to which injured birds can be taken for transportation to Mallydams. For independent carers ring Save Our Seabirds Charitable Trust:- Tel: 01323 411845

HOW OIL POLLUTION CAME TO BE A MARINE PROBLEM

Like transport inland, marine transport increasingly took to using oil as a fuel to burn in engines. In 1897 Dr. Rudolf Diesel exhibited a new engine that used oil as a fuel. In the next few years, marine diesel engines were developed and in 1911 the first diesel-powered ship crossed the Atlantic. By 1927 over a quarter (28 per cent) of the world's merchant ships used oil for power. The rest of the world's merchant ships were still powered by steam from boilers fuelled by coal or still used sail and wind power.

Oil was first transported in barrels. In 1885, the Gluckhauf, launched in Newcastle upon Tyne in north east England, was the first ship to carry oil in tanks rather than barrels, and so is considered the first oil tanker. Within a decade 99 per cent of oil exports from the USA, then the world's leading oil exporter, was being carried in tanks.

Measures to Halt Oil Pollution of the Sea: A LONG HAUL
By 1918 oil pollution was so obvious that the British Government forbade ship owners to discharge ballast or cleaning water within three miles of the coast. Three miles was the limit of sea over which the UK Government claimed control, - the "territorial limit". The United States banned it within 25 miles of its coast. Tanker owners were asked to try to prevent accidental spills when unloading cargoes. These and other measures were not effective. Seaborne trade is global. No one country can hope to deal with pollution problems on its own.

In the mid-1930's the UK Government under pressure from environmentalists, tried to establish a control system through the League of Nations. But some countries refused to agree and, with the approach of war, efforts ceased, until in 1945 the United Nations was set up. Its structure included existing and new specialised institutions. One of them was the International Maritime Organization, at first known as the Inter-Governmental Maritime Consultative Organization. It is the only United Nations body with its headquarters in Britain - on the South Bank of the Thames in London.

The Headquarters of the International Maritime Organization on the South Bank
of the River Thames just west of Lambeth Bridge. The Houses of Parliament are on
the North Bank to the east of the bridge. Photograph by kind permission of the IMO.

Created in 1948, it only began functioning ten years later. Its most important functions were to:-

"provide machinery for co-operation among Governments in technical matters of all kinds affecting shipping engaged in international trade" …

"encourage the general adoption of the highest practicable standards in matters concerning maritime safety and efficiency of navigation."

By 1953 the oil trade had changed: the main cargoes were now no longer petroleum but heavy crude oil. British taxpayers were duped; trains were made to run on diesel oil and the electrification of British Railways was deliberately postponed. Numbers of cars hugely increased and diesel became an alternative fuel to petrol for motor transport.

The United Kingdom in 1954 convened yet another international conference on oil pollution at which the countries which had decided to join the Inter-Governmental Consultative Organization actually agreed the text of an International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution of the Sea by Oil.

The arrangements for receiving oil cargoes and for the disposal of ships' waste oil in harbours were still inadequate. The thought of the cost of having to provide adequate facilities frightened some countries from ratifying the 1954 Convention.

In 1967 people unconnected with shipping were suddenly shaken into realising what oil entering the sea did to birds and other wildlife by the wreck of the tanker, the Torrey Canyon, off the South West Coast of England. The tanker had run aground on rocks so it was close inshore. Press and television publicised the black oil on holiday beaches, the destruction of fishermen's livelihoods and the dying birds. The arrangements for cleaning up such a mess were shown to be largely useless.

Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the IMO.

This disaster induced successive governments to make moves to limit the effects of further accidents through the International Maritime Organization.

Between 1988 and 2004 world seaborne trade rose by some 50 per cent: within that increase the amount of oil and petroleum products carried rose by 70 per cent. Global demand varies with the oil price. When the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised its oil prices in 1974, the drop in the amount of oil freight caused a drop in orders for new ships. Consequently ships have been kept in service beyond the IMO's optimum term of 22 years.

From the late 1960s shipping firms had an incentive to order bigger ships. The Suez Canal, briefly closed to shipping in 1956-57 when the Egyptian Government took control of it from Britain, was closed again in 1967 because of the Israeli "six-day war" - this time for 8 years. Ships then had to make the long journey round the Cape of Good Hope at a time when business was booming. Larger vessels carrying more cargo helped to compensate for the extra cost of the longer journey. After a few months the Canal was re-opened: however, regulations were later imposed limiting the size of vessels passing through Suez and other narrow waterways, the Straits of Malacca in Malaysia and the Panama Canal.

	dwt means deadweight i.e. the weight of cargo a ship can carry.
Increase in Size of Oil Tankers

Photograph by kind permission of the International Maritime Organization.

This 250,000 dwt tanker leaving Rotterdam in 1974 was more than twice as big as any vessel built ten years before. Within a few years ships of 500,000 dwt were being built; they still are. Increasing demand for oil over the long-term and the limits on size of vessels going through the Canal made investments in giant tankers profitable. Once built, because of their cost, shipping companies have kept them in use. Their sheer size increased the scale of an environmental disaster which would result if one was wrecked. By 1995 IMO member states had agreed that old tankers had to be equipped to meet more stringent safety standards; but there was the usual time-lag in implementation.

In the last 40 years there have been 7 catastrophic wrecks on or near British waters which have caused enormous emissions of oil into the sea:-

After the wreck of the Amoco Cadiz, its spilt oil cargo in the sea was deliberately set on fire as a means of limiting environmental damage.

The wreck of the Braer off Sumburgh Head and Fair Isle in the Shetlands provoked the UK Government INQUIRY INTO POLLUTION FROM MERCHANT SHIPPING ROUND UK COASTS headed by Lord Donaldson.

The wreck of the Tricolor was a case of poor seamanship and, as far as seabirds were concerned the worst of the lot. She was a perfectly sound Norwegian ship carrying a cargo of motor cars and a large quantity of fuel oil to see her across the Atlantic. On 14th December 2002, the Kariba, a cargo boat registered in the Bahamas collided with the Tricolor, in French waters off the Pas de Calais,19 miles north of Dunkerque - 3-4 miles outside Belgian waters and 5-6 miles outside UK waters. On 16th December 2002, the Nicola, also a general cargo boat, registered in the Netherlands Antilles, struck the wreck. On 1st January 2003 a Turkish tanker, the Vicky, struck it. All 3 ships were considered sound enough to sail on for repairs. However, some of the Tricolor's fuel oil was leaking into the sea. On 23rd January a tug trying to limit the damage done to her and her cargo tore a sealing device on one of her bunker fuel oil tanks and the real disaster began: 170 cubic meters of heavy fuel oil poured into the sea. Strong westerly and north-westerly winds blew the oil towards the Belgian coast. The question to be asked is: was the salvage vessel equipped with Dynamic Positioning Gear to enable her to stay on station despite the movements of the sea? Thousands of oiled birds, - guillemots, razorbills, grebes, scooters, kittiwakes, puffins, divers, gannets and eider ducks, - began to be washed up on Belgian, French and Dutch shores. At Ostend on January 25th a crisis centre for injured birds was set up. On 18th February the wind shifted from west to east and oil and oiled birds began to wash up on Kent and East Sussex coasts.

Photograph by Mr Maenhout; reproduced by courtesy of the
Flanders Bird Protection Society & Mr Maenhout.

The total number of seabirds injured and killed by this disaster is unclear, but the Belgian authorities say they received between 20,000 and 30,000; in addition there were those washed up elsewhere, only a small proportion of the total actually trapped by the Tricolor’s oil if the County Ecologists are right.

It is odd that this enormous loss of seabirds has not been included among the reasons given for the drop in numbers flying north to breed on Scottish islands in the Summer.

OIL POLLUTION OF THE SEA

The RSPCA and independent seabird carers have known for years and the Report of the 1993 Donaldson Inquiry Into Pollution from Merchant Shipping Round UK Coasts gave as its main conclusion that the chief cause of oil pollution of the sea is crews discharging fuel oil wastes from bilges and washing out oil tanks while vessels are under way at sea, principally to save shipping companies money. Also there is inadequate provision of reception facilities at ports for residues of waste oil and oil cargoes.

Maritime trade is a very ancient industry and its powerful influence with governments grew with colonial empire. An ingrained culture was developed among shipping companies, government officials, MPs, seafarers and the public when most people had family connections with the sea and many earned a living from it: it was taken for granted that it could be used as a cesspit into which they could put their polluting wastes. It was accepted that “turn around time”, the length of time spent in port unloading and loading should be as short as possible in order not to lose income and profit.

Waste Fuel Oil
Oil that remains in an engine when it is old and has lost its efficacy is supposed to be stored aboard in a holding tanker pumped into barrels. On car ferries tanker lorries drive aboard and the sludge is pumped directly into them. However, quite often a ship’s engineer has no option but to add an emulsifier to the sludge and pump the resultant slurry straight into the sea rather than into barrels on deck where space is at a premium. Deck storage of used oil also adds to costs as the storage drums have to be removed when the ship berths, not a cheap option. Moreover oily sludge discharged in UK ports is subject to a small import duty.

Any vessel using an engine or hydraulic hoses is a potential oil polluter. Most hydraulic spills arise from oil being washed off decks; hydraulic hoses and fittings have a habit of leaking or bursting.

On many small fishing boats or small cargo vessels hoses and other equipment are not checked frequently. Small vessels may not carry a full engineering complement so crew members are hard pressed to maintain every item. A fishing boat has more equipment and relatively less storage space for waste oil than, say, a 2,000 tonne tanker. There may be several different types of working engines on deck. All need oil changes. Salt sea corrodes metal, and fittings on pieces of apparatus are mainly made of steel. They are expensive so the ship-owners tend to delay replacing them.

Ports and Harbours
Oil emitted in ports and harbours is washed out into the open sea. In the mid-1990s, some tanker owners were complaining that 8 years after the MARPOL Convention became effective they were suffering from:

“the absence of reception facilities (for oil) in major oil export and import ports even in countries which are parties to the MARPOL Convention.”

The International Maritime Organization sees safe methods of handling both fuel and cargo oil and of disposing of spent lubricating oil as “crucial” to marine protection.

The safest method for the discharge of oil is by means of storage drums lifted from a vessel by quayside cranes. Large oil tankers may carry their own cranes. Most small harbours do not have cranes. Only one along the south east coast has a permanent oil disposal facility, the Southern Water installation at Rye Harbour which is owned by the Environment Agency.

If you live near a port, how are wastes and cargoes discharged there if there are no cranes?

Masters (captains) or ships’ agents, while a vessel is still at sea, call specialist waste disposal firms on land by radio telephone and fix a time for their tanker lorries to be at berths.

OIL TANKER

OIL TANKER showing fuel tanks, cargo tanks and spaces for machinery.

a. Tankers unload their cargo by means of hosepipes which are connected to a receptacle on shore. When the required amount has been pumped out, the pump in the ship is shut off and the hose is disconnected, BUT NO STOPPER IS PUT OVER THE END OF THE HOSE TO CONTAIN THE RESIDUE OF OIL LEFT IN THE PIPELINE. The hoses slip back into the harbour and are pulled, trailing behind the tanker as she puts to sea, with the oil in the pipes spilling out.

b. Even when a tank is emptied the oil, which is sticky, clings to the sides and floor. The crew hose it out with sea water once they are at sea, i.e. they “flush out” the tank.

c. Or once the oil cargo is discharged, sea water is pumped into the empty tanks anyway to act as ballast for the homeward voyage. Once arrived at the home port it is pumped out of these flush tanks into the harbour taking the remains of the oil with it.

This kind of dumping is decreasing as enforcement of regulations is tightened, but it still happens on dark winter nights and misty overcast days. Until the level of fines charged for dumping round UK coasts began rising as a result of the Donaldson Recommendations, it was customary for culpable skippers of vessels called to account by shore authorities to come ashore with a large wad of bank notes, pay off fines imposed and avoid delaying departure by involvement in legal proceedings.

There is a new concern about container ports. Every country has ratified the relevant IMO Conventions on the regulation of ports except one: the Arab Emirates of which Dubai has the strongest marine interest. The reigning Al Maktoum family has created a huge Container Port business in the Gulf, specialising in shipping oil. IMO officials have so far failed to persuade the Emirates to take an interest in conserving their own waters or any others.

Fifty-one per cent of the Container section of the huge Southampton docks has been bought by the Al Maktoum’s Dubai Ports World. It is to be hoped that Associated British Ports who own the whole docks including the rest of the Container port, ensure that emissions of oil are at least no worse than the average. Al Maktoum Dubai Ports World bought the hugely profitable Container Ports division of P&O which has 29 installations throughout the world: the US Government was so concerned that it has blocked the sale of the 6 on its own coasts.

Sub-standard vessels
The building of a ship requires a large cash investment; owners keep them in service beyond the IMO’s optimum of 22 years. The Braer was 23 years old, the Prestige 26 years old. They disregard the increasing amount of maintenance and repairs aging ships need, and are reluctant to install the latest anti-pollution devices on grounds of cost.

Losses of larger ships, e.g. tankers and bulk-carriers have been decreasing, but losses of smaller vessels are rising: “more than 14 per cent of inspected ships have been in such poor condition that they had to be detained … in port as unsafe.” (NUMAST – now NAUTILUS UK – Report, 2006, quoting Paris Memorandum of Understanding).

A Couple of Recent Local Examples
At the end of January 2006, 28 miles north-west of Guernsey, a Polish chemical bulk-carrier of 23,000 tonnes, the General Grot-Rowecki, registered in Malta, on its way to Poland collided with the 11,000 tonne chemical tanker, the Ece, registered in the Marshall Islands, travelling from Morocco to Belgium. The Polish ship pierced the outer skin of the Ece’s double hull below the water-line, herself suffering only a small dent in her bow; she continued up the Channel with her Polish crew. By the late 1990s she was known to be accumulating weaknesses and faults: in 2003 a port inspection in Quebec found problems with her fire-doors, engines, safety equipment and paperwork and her oil pollution prevention equipment was not working.

The collision occurred in French waters as the Ece was being towed to Le Havre when she sank, her cargo of 10,000 tonnes of phosphoric acid leaking out; the Maritime and Coastguard Agency said it was not very dangerous. What was a long-term danger was her used and unused fuel oil. As with all oil-fuelled vessels, as their tanks corrode, the oil seeps into the sea. The European continental shelf is the largest in the planet and much of the sea over it is shallow; partly because of its size it is poorly monitored and badly administered. So a sunken vessel becomes an obstacle and a risk to shipping.
This emergency wreck-marking buoy was being tried out in 2006 by the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA).	Photo by Plc Trinity House, by kind permission of “NAUTILUS UK TELEGRAPH”, Jan. 2007.

* * * * * * * * * * *

In mid-January this year an unknown vessel unlawfully emptied its bilge into the Channel creating a slick. On 18th January in fairly severe weather, the hull of another ship, the South Korean-built 62,000 tonne Napoli, (originally the Normandie) carrying 2,390 containers, 153 of them filled with poisonous pesticides and insecticides, CRACKED! The engine room was flooded so more heavy oil leaked into the sea. As a result 1,169 injured seabirds came into care centres, chiefly the RSPCA unit at Taunton which had to offload hundreds to a unit in Cheshire and the Mallydams Wood unit near Hastings.

A few days before she had been passed fit to sail by Inspectors in Antwerp. However, insurers of the contents of the containers are taking legal opinion as to whether she was seaworthy. There are the usual complications as to where responsibility lies: She is owned by the Mediterranean Shipping Company based in Switzerland; which transferred ownership of this particular ship to a company in the Virgin Islands because compensation for pollution is less for small then for large firms; she was operated by Zodiac Maritime, based in London, so she was registered under the UK flag; the International Transporters Trade Federation has black-listed Zodiac as one of the worst companies; there are queries over her condition because 5 years ago she hit a coral reef in the Malacca Strait; she was repaired in a Vietnamese shipyard where over 3,000 tonnes of steel had been welded to her broken hull; and the fact is no other ship broke in two in the same weather and her hull broke a second time.

Liability and Compensation Claims
One result of the wreck of the Torrey Canyon was the IMO’s Civil Liability Convention which specified the amount of compensation shipowners would have to pay to cover pollution damage. Some felt the compensation was too low. Shipowners, however, made it plain to their governments they would not accept a rise in the amount of compensation they were required to pay. In 1971 a second International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage was established. Contributions were to be paid not by shipowners, but by oil importers. It came into force in 1978 and eleven years later 14 companies, about three-quarters of those handling oil had accepted it. Limits to shipowners financial liability were raised to almost double; some countries including the USA, wanted them even higher. This agreement is intended to ensure that large compensation claims are met without the need for legal action. Legal costs of claiming compensation are huge and there is no guarantee that a claim will succeed.

Shipping companies take out insurance against accidents; they operate “Proof of Indemnity” clubs as a kind of mutual insurance. Compensation claims for clean-ups are mostly brought by governments whose people suffer loss of earnings and to make good damage to the tourist trade. Even in the case of a single shipwreck, proceedings are often lengthy. For example it took 20 years to settle claims arising from the wreck of the Amoco Cadiz. In the case of multiple collisions they are likely to be even more complicated.

Recent disastrous wrecks revealed shipping arrangements are deliberately chaotic and complicated which make it difficult to identify who is liable to pay compensation in the event of a wreck. Even large shipping companies now “flag-hop” i.e. register ships under different flags of convenience to avoid inspections to check on safety: out-sourcing has long been established to take advantage of the cheapest crews, irrespective of nationality.

The Prestige was owned nominally by a broker on behalf of the Liberian Mare International, the proprietorial company: it was chartered by Crown Resources, the London office of a firm whose headquarters are in Switzerland and which is one of the companies in a conglomerate, Universe Maritime, owned by one of the new generation of Russian tycoons; the ship was managed by a Greek company and had a Greek captain and crew. The broker claimed that the ship had recently been cleared as seaworthy by the US shipping authorities, so he, Crown Resources and Universe Maritime were not responsible for the ship’s age and unseaworthiness.

NUMAST now NAUTILUS UK, the trade union for officers serving in the Merchant Navy, in 2000 produced a Report on International Shipping Regulations (How Many More?) in which it demanded that “self-regulation” by shipowners should no longer be accepted “as an alternative to agreed international standards and controls” laid down by the International Maritime Organization and the International Labour Organization, two of the oldest established authorities in the UN system. The union demands that incentives to adopt the “quality pays” approach have to be developed and at the same time penalties have to be introduced for all those who go on operating sub-standard shipping along with procedures to determine who in the chain of operations is responsible for vessels foundering. The crucial group in the shipping industry with the power to bring this about are the Marine Insurers for they can charge high premiums for sub-standard vessels so that shipowners would not think it worth running such ships.

Oil is dangerous on land as well as sea. There are very strict regulations in Britain and other countries on the way it is transported on land and they are very strictly enforced. A spill from an oil tanker lorry on a road is regarded as a major pollution incident. The question now being asked is: why is there not enough strict enforcement on the three-quarters of the planet which is sea?

Air Pollution from Shipping
There is a further form of pollution from shipping, partly involving oil but affecting air quality more than the sea: incineration of wastes on ships is now engaging the attentions of Nautilus UK and environmentalists. It is another expedient for avoiding costs of discharging wastes at ports and “turn-around time”.

Photo by Eric Houri, reproduced by kind permission of “NAUTILUS UK TELEGRAPH” Jan. 2007.

In 1989 IMO Member States adopted a Convention to cut dumping of both industrial wastes and incineration of wastes by vessels at sea. Like emissions from motor vehicles on land, the smoke contains sulphur, nitrogen, particulates and other harmful substances. There was no interest in addressing the problem until 2006-07 when the US International Longshoremen & Warehouse Union began to campaign for a reduction of 20 per cent by 2010 of smoke emissions from diesel-burning ships.

In January 2007 Intertanko, the tankers’ owners’ organisation, began backing moves to make the world merchant fleet run on distillate fuels to cut incineration of wastes at sea producing smoke that included sulphur, nitrogen, particulates and other harmful substances, in particular by limiting sulphur emissions in designated areas. They have the support of the IMO and Nautilus UK. However, shipowners are split on the issue, not only on the usual grounds of extra cost. Along with several Northern European Governments some argue for mixed solutions such as the use of smoke “scrubbing”. With pressure on motor and air transport to help slow up global warming and reduce health risks by cleaning up their polluting emissions, the shipping industry is having to give serious consideration on how to do the same.

OIL RIGS

To cash in on the global demand and huge profits from oil companies are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to get it. For instance the British Petroleum Company sent a number of ships carrying not only equipment but also pre-fabricated houses all the way to create a town in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska.

This specially created community was to work the oilfield there. Yet the climate is so cold that the sea is passable for only about 6 weeks each summer when enough ice melts to let the oil tankers through. Drilling and operating wells on the sea-bed is common. Oil has been located in the English Channel off the East Sussex coast, opposite Eastbourne. The British Petroleum Company took out a licence to investigate. Like others it has been put on hold until the company decides the time is right to invest in developing it. Private companies opperate oil wells in UK coastal waters on licences for the government, the usual arrangement throughout the world.

Submarine Wellhead Platform System

Methods of extracting Oil from the sea-bed
At first oil was brought up to platforms built over wells. On them there are buildings several storeys high. Men and women who work on these rigs and divers live on them for months at a time. They see to the transport of oil by tanker ships to terminals on the shore.

Or oil is piped direct from the sub-sea well-head to the nearest land terminal. There are still many rigs round our coasts but they are being phased out in favour of the submarine method. Sub-sea well-heads are enclosed in a hump like a tortoise shell. Divers open the humps, i.e. the covers, on the well-heads to check the machinery is working properly so that companies are not losing money and the sea is not being polluted by leaks. It is dangerous work.

Whether from rigs or stationary boats, transporting oil to shore terminals involves the same risks of it getting into the sea as discharging wastes and cargoes in harbours.

Concern about the environment led the Dutch Government to insist that a rig built in the environmentally sensitive area of the Waddenzee in the Scheldt estuary should be totally safe. This oil field was discovered in 1970, but the Dutch Government’s standards were so exacting that it took 14 years before they granted a licence to the French group of companies operating the rig, Elf Petroland, to begin producing oil!

The remotely controlled unmanned Zuidwal platform in the Waddenzee.

Not even the rainwater off this platform is allowed to drain into the sea because rain contains aerial pollutants. It is the best environmentally safe oil rig built in the world so far but it has not been copied because it is more expensive than submarine pipelines despite their risks to the sea and to divers.

CHEMICAL POLLUTION AT SEA

Build-up of regulations
Control of the transport of chemicals and other dangerous goods is tied up with the development of measures to ensure SAFETY OF LIFE AT SEA. No thought was given to the effect of spills or dumping of such cargoes on the marine ecology, until the second half of the twentieth century.

The first effort, the British Merchant Shipping Act of 1894, was intended to protect emigrants. The first international Convention was agreed in 1914. For more than 50 years it was forbidden to carry cargoes dangerous to passengers and to a ship’s safety. The danger was defined not only by the nature of a cargo, but also by the amount and the way it was stowed. The overriding principle behind the control of chemical cargoes is still protection of human life only. But the definition of what was dangerous was left to shipping companies. This policy continued until 1948. By that time, following the 1939-45 war, the trade in dangerous goods had grown considerably. When the Safety of Life at Sea Convention was updated that year, a system of labelling goods was recommended and in 1960 an internationally agreed code was proposed. It was ready five years later, and is being constantly revised and updated.

The MARPOL 1973 Convention covered not only the deliberate disposal of oil at sea, but also of both liquid and packaged chemicals. Some 250 were listed as “noxious”. This part of the Convention held up its adoption even more than the provisions about oil disposal. Governments were given extra time to arrange implementation of the provisions.

An INTERNATIONAL BULK CHEMICAL CODE was made mandatory for dangerous liquid cargoes in 1985 and came into force the following year. But the need for reception facilities for chemical cargoes was reduced and cargo tank cleaning procedures simplified.

LABELS MARKING DANGEROUS GOODS CARRIED AT SEA

List reproduced by kind permission of the IMO

Lethal Litter
A large sack containing sodium hydroxide made by a German industrial concern
washed up on a Yorkshire beach. Photo by courtesy of Tidy Britain Group

Everyone of these substances has to have a special mark on its tank or packaging, except for one in Category 9, the polychlorinated biphenyls. Some of these marks are shown above. The marking system differentiates between the most and less dangerous. But by 1993 only 44 countries had signed the agreement and whether the Code is mandatory or merely applied as a recommendation, depends on their own legal systems. So the application of these provisions remains optional. By 1990, forty-five countries whose merchant fleets made up 85 per cent of the world’s ships claimed to be applying the Code, but most of them do not supply details of what they are doing to the International Maritime Organization as they are supposed to do.

The International Maritime Organization estimated that by autumn 1989 half of the cargoes being transported about the world were dangerous or harmful. They included solid or liquid chemicals, gases, nuclear and other materials and products for oil refineries.

The expectation is that as industrialisation spreads in the world, the amount of these hazardous cargoes is bound to grow. Big international chemical concerns are cutting costs of production by investing in plants in countries where labour is cheaper and safety standards are lower.

In so far as any of these substances are considered necessary for the maintenance of health and well-being, they need to be transported. The questions that arise are: are these substances really necessary? can they, or equivalent substitutes be manufactured locally so that none has to be transported any great distance?

Splendid gardens were created before chemical fertilisers were devised; the eighteenth century agricultural revolution did not depend on them. Can you think of ways to mark out sports grounds like football pitches and tennis courts without using a dangerous chemical substance to fix the paint? At present paint for marking pitches often contains a very poisonous mixture of chemicals known as PARAQUAT.

Transport of chemical cargoes
Chemical carriers may be ships originally built for other purposes and converted. For example, the Aegean Mariner was built in 1968 at Bremen in Germany as a bulk carrier; after 25 years she was owned and used by Endeavour Navigation SA and registered in Panama.

Less toxic chemicals are transported in chemical tanks. There are cases in which to cut “turn-around time”, tanks are not properly washed out between one voyage and the next so that one liquid chemical is put into a tank containing the residues of another, building up a highly toxic mixture.

Given the high levels of unemployment generally and the poverty in some flag of convenience countries, it is too much to expect crews to refuse to handle dangerous chemical cargoes.

Chemical tanks, like those for oil are also washed out at sea. The assumption is that discharges are quickly dispersed by huge volumes of water.

Why poisonous chemical cargoes are put in The Channel
It is criminally reckless for any ship to transport toxic chemicals through waters where rough weather may be expected like the Channel from autumn to spring.

International agreements on protecting the marine environment from oil, chemical and other kinds of pollution have begun to extend the responsibility of ships’ captains to marine ecology. However, a captain is responsible primarily for human life on board his ship. In order to maximise safety for crews, highly toxic chemicals are not carried in tanks in holds. They are carried in small plastic containers lashed to decks and no doubt with some light covering such as a tarpaulin. If the covering and containers become loose, as happens in stormy weather they represent an immense hazard to the crew. So a master will order that they be dumped overboard and shore authorities are immediately informed.

The bottoms of vessels are coated with anti-fouling paints to delay corrosion. Some of them are extremely poisonous and encourage cancers. Happily they have been completely banned in the UK for some years although substitutes are very expensive and not quite as effective. They are, however, still permitted in countries close to us, such as France.

So little of some of these substances is so lethal that it is bound to kill off the vital plankton and to be ingested by some fish and birds. A few birds have been coming into care, obviously poisoned, but the substances remain unknown. Baffled carers send them to the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology and other research bodies for analysis. So far these research bodies appear also to have been baffled.

Main UK Importers and Exporters of Chemicals who
Contribute to Chemical Pollution.

Based on a map produced by Greenpeace UK with their kind permission.

TRAINED CREWS ARE CRUCIAL
Implementation of regulations against oil and chemical dumping depend on trained crews. Training sets the standard for the global merchant shipping industry in respect of marine conservation. The British shipping industry has long been outsourcing work to Flag-of-convenience states such as Panama and Liberia by registering ships with them to take advantage of low pay, long hours and generally poor working conditions.

To benefit from outsourcing British shipping companies, following colonial practice of using cheap colonial labour, are excused from observing the 1976 Race Relations Act; i.e. they are allowed to employ foreign seamen on UK-flagged ships at lower rates than their British counterparts. While our governments ignore our own Racial Equality laws in the matter of pay, they uphold EU laws on discrimination against people on grounds of their nationality which allows shipping employers to put cheap labour and bad working conditions ahead of reliability.

The Tonnage Tax
The British, like any other shipping industry, is focussed on profit, not patriotism. By the late 1990s the British Government had to face the fact that our merchant marine was ceasing to exist and urgently needed to be revived. In 1998 it came up with a policy to revive it: “CHARTING A NEW COURSE”; the most significant innovation was the TONNAGE TAX, which allows shipping companies to pay a set tax on the tonnage owned by their UK arms instead of normal corporation tax. As a quid pro quo they were to register more ships in British ports and they were to commit more resources to the training of crews and employ more UK nationals.

British seamen have to be trained, ratings (ordinary seamen) must have at least a Class 1 Certificate; they all serve in British-owned vessels. However, more than half the members of Nautilus UK, the Merchant Navy Officers’ trade union, now serve on non-UK registered ships.

Numbers and Proportions of Ratings and Officers Employed on UK Registered Ships Since the Introduction of the Tonnage Tax.

Source: RMT “Shipping Industry Tonnage Tax Concession Briefing for MPs”.

Numbers of British ratings and officers have risen since the introduction of the Tonnage Tax; but the proportion employed has dropped by nearly half. Cheap foreign labour is helping to depress working conditions and hence discouraging recruitment – low pay, poor living conditions aboard ship and working hours well above the statutory minimum with fatigue increasing the chance of accidents, all bad news for the sea and its creatures.

Employers have not been honouring their side of the Tonnage Tax agreement to train seafarers. An officer cadet recently complained that on his UK-flagged training ship, the foreign officers taught that “it is OK to remove lifebuoys in bad weather as they are expensive to replace” and throwing oil and chemical drums overboard is normal “only do it at night”.

The IMO World Maritime University, Malmo, Sweden

Photo reproduced by kind permission of the IMO

The World Maritime University was opened in 1983 in Malmo, Sweden to further the aims of the International Maritime Organization. With the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, it gives training for senior specialist maritime personnel. But it also has branches giving short courses in: Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, China, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ghana, India, Morocco, United Arab Emirates.

The number of larger UK-registered ships nearly doubled in the 8 years 1997-2005, as foreign firms and operators registered ships here, like Zodiac Maritime, to take advantage of the Tonnage Tax. However the number of British-owned ships on the register declined; about two-thirds of them are now registered with Flag-of-convenience states. The Tax has not stopped “flagging out”.

Shipping companies can register their ships and recruit crews in any country. The 26-man crew of the Napoli were from: Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, the Philippines and Britain, represented by 2 trainee officers. Multinational crews speaking different languages are liable to have difficulties communicating with each other which may endanger ships and cargoes.

The trend among employers to prefer cheaper, less trained and experienced foreign crews is spreading: the Danish Government has decided that to bring them into line with EU law, skippers in their national merchant fleet no longer have to be Danish. The Indian seamen’s union is fighting employers’ pressure on their Government to permit the employment of foreign nationals on national flagged ships. British, Irish and Finnish trade unions are now struggling against companies replacing their members with East Europeans. The most crucial dispute dates back to 2004 when the Finnish ferry company, the Viking Line, tried to transfer a passenger ferry on its Helsinki-Tallin route to the Estonian flag and employ Estonian crews as part of a plan to cut crewing costs by 60 per cent. The Viking Line successfully applied to the UK Commercial Court to stop the International Transport Workers’ Federation, based in Britain and the Finnish Seamen’s Union from taking action to block the move. The re-flagging would set a precedent for cutting crewing costs for all EU member states. The case has reached the European Court of Justice. It is critically important for two key constitutional principles are at stake, the single market cross-border “free movement” provisions of EU policy against the right of workers to take collective action to protect their jobs. The UK government is representing the EU against the Federation and the Union contending that collective action including strikes is not a fundamental EU right protected by law. The immediate issue is the extent to which EU powers can encroach on the national social policies of member states and of industrial action. In fact there has been no strike; in the meantime the ferry has been kept under the Finnish flag and the Finnish seamen have agreed a 10 per cent cut in crewing costs, an arrangement which runs out in 2008; but the Court has yet to rule on the case. It is of international importance because of the concerted efforts of shipping companies to employ cheaper crews: the Federation is defending the right to earn enough for a decent living against the rights of business “to do what it takes to up its profits.”

PROTECTING THE SEA
By the early 1990s, Parliament was taking action to protect the sea. The House of Commons Environment Committee in March 1992 unanimously informed the Government:

“We firmly believe that coastal protection, planning and management in the UK suffer from centuries of uncoordinated decisions and actions at both the national and local levels. We found that there are inadequacies in legislation, anomalies in the planning system, a lack of central guidance and overlapping and conflicting policies and responsibilities … among a host of bodies …”

The Committee wanted regular environmental assessments and environmental duties laid on harbour authorities who should be encouraged to work with local groups with responsibility for the marine environment under a single national body, the Environment Protection Agency.

The Transport & Works Act of that year specifically imposed on Port and Harbour Authorities a duty of protecting the environment and an obligation to carry out environmental impact assessments. The Ports Authorities Association, however, declared its implacable opposition to such assessments and to EU Habitat Directives. The Department of Transport claimed that neither it itself nor the Association bothered with the Act.

Each port is run by an independent commercial company which largely controls its water and land. The management of ports and harbours is now a cut-throat business. The Association has spare capacity for ships. UK harbours are competing with those on the Continent like Rotterdam, with the concentration of Channel transportation in the hands of ferry companies, whose vessels are very large to the detriment of smaller vessels; and there is the competition of the Chunnel.

Paying port charges for the use of facilities to unload cargoes is part of shipping business. But paying for unloading wastes is different. They can be jettisoned free in the sea. On top of payment for port disposal facilities, Shippers are charged a small IMPORT DUTY for any oil sludge they off-load in ports. Local Authorities have no say and indeed welcome ports as sources of income and work. However, the West Sussex County Council, perturbed about fuel oil discharges, was pressing ports managements and operators to establish local liaison groups which could draw attention to environmental shortcomings.

From January 1996 the Minister for Aviation and Shipping began to acquire powers enabling him to make certain measures mandatory against the disposal of polluting wastes at sea. They culminated in the Merchant Shipping and Maritime Security Act of March 1997 which was intended both to improve the provision and use of waste reception facilities in ports and to reduce the charges to shipping companies for making use of them. When the 1997 Act was passed Lord Goschen, Minister for Aviation and Shipping said:-

“The sea is one of our most valuable resources. We are not prepared to see it polluted by the deliberate discharging of waste from ships. Discharges should be as unacceptable as fly-tipping on land.”

The level of fines for causing pollution was raised from a maximum of £50,000 to £250,000.

Agreements have been made between countries to establish responsibility for the safety of the sea based upon the MEDIAN LINE, an imaginary line drawn through the sea, equidistant between countries on either side, e.g. through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean between Greenland, Canada and the United States of America in the west and Iceland, Britain, Ireland, France, Portugal and Spain in the east. Establishing the principle of the Median Line would mean that the whole globe would be covered by a network of responsibility for the sea based on the United Nations Law of the Sea. The UK now has legal powers to deal with marine oil pollution up to 200 miles from its shores.

There was little support for these measures from the big environmental NGOs: the only national organisation condemning the continual pollution of the sea was the RSPCA because their staff were – are – dealing with the results of it; it is independent of government funding and is the main body dealing with all wildlife. Otherwise only small charities like the SOS Trust and independent carers and their organisations were demanding action.

THE MARINE BILL
In 2002 the RSPB was sufficiently worried by the reduction in some seabird species and by threats to migrating birds in estuaries to persuade John Randall MP, to bring in a Marine Bill. The RSPB knows a great deal about birds, but very little about the sea so the Bill was very limited in scope and couched in terms of land. Although that Bill failed other large NGOs like the Wildlife Trusts and World Wildlife Fund joined the RSPB in pressing for a wider piece of legislation and Parliamentary support was growing. DEFRA was already addressing the confusion over coastal planning: its Marine Fisheries section was expanded into the Marine and Fisheries Agency, covering not only sea fisheries but far more aspects of the sea. In summer 2006 it produced proposals for a Marine Bill which were put out for public consultation. It has now become a White Paper, i.e. the Government has declared its intention to legislate and there is now another 3 months, until June for further consultation.

The propulsion of DEFRA into recognition of the marine environment and the urgent need to have it from pollution and other abuse is a very big victory indeed. However, the White Paper resulting from the 2006 consultation shows typical New Labour efforts to impose centralised control to fit perceived problems which are to be solved by meeting proposed “targets” in line with EU Directives and the diktats of the market. Parliament is being asked to approve a new Government Department to deal with ALL Marine matters in contrast to land matters which are dealt with severally, the MARINE MANAGEMENT ORGANISATION, with the Secretary of State for DEFRA formally accountable to Parliament for it, advised by a “cross-government MMO Sponsorship group” of different Departments. The group would check that the MMO was achieving “targets” and delivering “value for money”. The MMO would deal with England and, in some matters for Northern Ireland and Wales but Scotland would keep its own institutions.

At present there are 3 bodies which between them cover the whole range of marine management and conservation issues; in varying degrees they need only more resources to be really effective.

1. The Marine & Fisheries Agency which, in addition to marine fisheries, has just been expanded to cover the administration of statutory licences for marine works including marine pollution response, marine renewables and aggregates, the control of coastal and offshore marine habitats, including those of birds, coastal defences, wind farms, wave and tidal power, marine sand and gravel extraction, disposal of marine dredgings at sea, contingency planning for oil spills and other marine pollution.
   
2. The Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture carries out and is planning to increase its scientific research and provision of business information to “customers outside DEFRA while maintaining Government access to essential services”; also working on wildlife research there are the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and Natural England.
   
   Both the Agency and the Centre are Departments of DEFRA. Licensing of activities affecting the sea, such as dredging involves co-operation with the Crown Estate as landowner of most of the seabed to 12 nautical miles offshore. Its rights are exercised by the Crown Estate Commissioners responsible for enhancing its value in the long-term. They licence dredging for aggregates and mineral extraction but not oil, gas and coal. However the 2004 Energy Act added to the Crown Estate the licensing rights for “the generation of renewable energy on the continental shelf”, e.g. installations for tidal power, wind farms etc. which could be obstacles to shipping, within the “Renewable Energy Zone” 200 nautical miles out.
   
   The MMO has also to deal with the remnants of the great British fishing industry; curiously it was omitted from the first Consultation Paper and its inclusion is a victory for complainants like the SOS Trust. However, its re-instatement entails conflict over EU fishing policy.
   
   When 1970s governments handed over control of the great British fishing industry with all its onshore ancillary occupations to the European Commission, as it then was, they opened the way for other west European states to plunder our waters, without studies to determine the scientific or economic and social consequences.
   
   Since 1888 UK sea fisheries have been regulated by local committees: their detailed knowledge ensured their retention in the new marine policy. However, under the MMO proposals they are to be remodelled with increased emphasis on the EU “reformed fisheries policy”. They are now set up through application to local Councils. Under the Bill it would be mandatory for all coastal Local Authorities to establish them and contribute to their funding and committees would be required to regulate “recreational fishing”. However, while the elected Local Councils would still be represented on them, the Sea Fisheries Committees would work under the direction of the Regional Advisory Councils, Government quangos promoting direct involvement with the EU.
   
   There can be no disagreement about DEFRA’s stated aims of sustainability and the maintenance of some sort of UK fisheries. However, existing Sea Fisheries Committees are not happy. Limitations are imposed on catches by EU “quotas” of fish species in short supply, a circumscription chiefly affecting larger boats, so perpetuating the current destructive practice whereby fishermen throw proscribed species, dying or dead in their nets, back into the sea in order to avoid being fined for landing them. The alternatives of limiting “effort”, the number of days per month a boat may operate, or adopting existing technologies to exclude protected species are not considered.
   
   The interests of fishermen, seabirds, fish and the whole marine ecology are the same, a living healthy environment which requires a real revival of our fishing industry. DEFRA claims that EU “quotas” are the only way forward and cannot be questioned due to UK agreement to EU treatises and principles. Instead there is encouragement for fishing for shell-fish, dog-fish and whatever species are left.
   
   The Sea Fisheries Committees see reform of the EU “quotas” system as vital and further restrictions on what fishermen can catch as unacceptable. Their focus is not compliance with Brussels, but restoration of our commercial fishing with due regard for marine conservation and sustainability. It is clear that many of the Marine Management Organisation’s proposed functions are already supplied through the wide scope of the Marine & Fisheries Agency; tidying up the spread of marine activities is a “fait accompli”, circumscribed by adherence to EU Directives.
   
3. The Maritime & Coastguard Agency
   The Government’s response to points raised in the 2006 Consultation included a brief acknowledgement that sustainability requires attention to wider shipping interests. Accordingly DEFRA has recognised the need to improve the management of Ports and Harbours which will be expected to implement regulations. There are no suggestions on how their owners will be persuaded to greater co-operation with legislation than in the past.
   
   The problems posed by the huge amount of merchant shipping round UK coasts is dealt with in 4 short paragraphs in this White Paper, with no suggestion of a review of the impact of legislation in response to the Donaldson Report. The DEFRA White Paper briefly acknowledges that the Maritime & Coastguard Agency “holds significant data about the marine environment” and is responsible for environmental control of shipping in UK waters and the Government’s maritime safety policy. However there is not as yet significant indication on how mutual cooperation would work between the MMO/Marine & Fisheries Agency and the Maritime Coastguard Agency, no commitment to including MCA representatives on the proposed MMO Board of Directors nor of how the Marine & Fisheries Agency responsibility for pollution will combine with the anti-pollution role of the MCA.
   
   The Maritime & Coastguard Agency is part of the Department of Transport, not DEFRA, which on that account, may be a little tentative as well as nervous at the thought of engaging with powerfully autonomous shipping interests. Nautilus UK is having discussions with the latest Secretary for the Environment, David Miliband, to try to ensure that the substantive issue of enforcement of the Marine Safety Regime for the preservation and usage of our coastal waters is included in the proposed Marine Bill.
   
   Environmental organisations, euphoric at the prospect of serious attention to marine conservation, should be aware of the strong opposition to some of DEFRA’s current and planned activities, and to heavy Government support for global corporate influence. Even a summary mention of merchant shipping and the Maritime & Coastguard Agency may, however be accounted a tiny victory for those of us who criticised its total exclusion from the first Consultation Paper. On an optimistic note, as Prime Minister Blair recently told the House of Commons, an incoming government is not bound by agreements made by its predecessors.

PRIORITISING THE SAFETY OF THE SEA

Inspectors are the front-line in enforcement of legislation. There are not nearly enough of them; Marine Surveyors are being required to take on Inspectors’ work. Crucially and shamefully the Maritime & Coastguard agency is woefully underfunded and under-resourced. More and more demands are being made of it under Port-State control regulations on the country or “flag” under which a vessel is registered.

One rule which it is claimed is now being observed by British and foreign registered ships is entry in the Oil Record Book of the amounts of oil cargo and, more importantly, of fuel oil which every ship has to have on board when setting off, so that they match exactly the amounts discharged at the end of a voyage: the Record Books must be checked by Inspectors.

The Royal Navy has a commitment “to ensure full compliance with UK and International Legislation to protect the marine and other environments.” It has been carrying out surveillance using old mine-sweepers, which have sometimes proved too slow to apprehend interlopers, and pollution spotting from e.g. its helicopter centre at Culrose near Plymouth. However, in January after an internal review of Government expenditure, cost-cutting plans for “mothballing” nearly half the Royal Navy fleet were leaked. It was therefore heartening to learn from the DEFRA Marine & Fisheries Agency that the RN Fisheries Protection Squadron has been issued with 2 or 3 fast patrol boats to carry out its policing in coastal waters.

There has been no good news about the Coastguard drastically reduced in the 1990s. On the south east coast there are now only two stations operating full-time, at Southampton and Dover. DEFRA claims every vessel passing through the Dover Strait is registered; the station staff, however, say that does not include small boats because of the enormous numbers of craft passing. The part-time and voluntary staff who man the posts in between cannot check on the 500 or so ships going through the Channel daily; not so long ago, when there was public interest in the sea, at tourist resorts they used to post up notices of the most important vessels passing, a practice which, if revived, might help to reawaken public awareness of the sea.

Lately there has been pressure to ensure ships are seaworthy and crews properly trained. In December 2006 two market reviews, one of them by the HSBC bank, warned shipowners that large numbers of new vessels now being delivered would not lead to reductions in insurance costs because insurers are worried by a growing shortage of trained experienced seamen which poses risks to the safety of vessels. Faster, more complex and larger ships are operating in more congested waterways including the Channel. The Proof of Indemnity Clubs run by some shipping companies are themselves putting pressure on operators of sub-standard vessels, with the threat that those with poor records may possibly be excluded from membership.

International trade unions led by Nautilus UK, whose General Secretary is also Chairman of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, have just obtained through the International Labour Office a Bill of Rights for Seafarers.

COMMUNICATIONS AT SEA

By the beginning of the 20th century radio communications, ship-to-ship were established; vessels could pick up SOS calls and go to the rescue of those in trouble. There were, however, limitations: the basis of the system was morse telegraphy and it takes a long time to train an operator; also by the 1960s the airwaves were becoming congested as land radio developed.

In 1962 TELSTAR, the world’s first communications satellite, was put into orbit. The IMO was quick to see its possibilities for shipping. By 1976 the Convention on the Establishment of the International Maritime Satellite Organization was adopted: INMARSAT, an independent body, was operational by 1983 giving shipping for the first time its own communications system, telephone, telex and fax and, an attraction for shipping companies, privacy of communication between shipowners and their vessels. INMARSAT’s improved response to distress and safety calls led to the Global Maritime Distress & Safety System (GMDSS) which rapidly alerts search and rescue authorities on shore of an emergency and helps to co-ordinate responses. GMDSS makes reception of distress signals virtually certain in any area of the world. However, it does not:-

• warn crews of impending collisions, witness the Tricolor disaster;
• provide a facility for a shore station to receive an alert in advance of
  an accident;
• establish a system for monitoring the conduct of vessels which would
  reduce pollution.

Following the Donaldson Report Into Pollution from Merchant Shipping Round UK Coasts, the Norwegian shipping authorities, - not the British, - inaugurated their own monitoring system, but it is not perfect; no such system can be unless it is operated globally.

The IMO Sub-Committee on Safety of Navigation approved reception of the Global Maritime Distress & Safety System aboard ships via –

The Galileo Satellite System

Photo by ESA of the Galileo Satellite System reproduced by kind permission of the International Maritime Organization.

For years the Save Our Seabirds Charitable Trust has been advocating a global system for tracking and maintaining contact with shipping in the same way as aircraft are tracked:-

Nautilus UK has just established a close link with its Dutch counterpart, Nautilus NL; the Dutch are said to have strict standards on preventing pollution and accidents in their national waters. So there is a hope that Dutch insurers and Government would follow a British precedent and that UNIMOS would spread internationally.

However, neither radio nor satellites are of help in warning of obstacles on the sea-bed. Only a sonar navigation system can alert shipping to say, shifting sand-banks whose position cannot be fixed on charts. In our present market-ridden economy, neither the morality of saving the marine eco-system nor of keeping safe those who gain a livelihood from it will make for sea safety – only the motive of profit. As is usual, the mere passing of laws will not eradicate bad practice. There is, however, one huge power which can achieve improvement: informed public opinion, vigilance and determination that marine pollution must be stopped. There are signs that, at the start of the 21st century, it is having a little effect.