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Does anybody have more info, or a contact person where I could get more info? Thanks. Iain Canada Helping Seabirds from Oil TORONTO (AP) -- Canada's coast guard and other federal agencies are escalating their fight against clandestine, deliberate oil spills that are killing tens of thousands of seabirds annually in busy shipping lanes off Newfoundland. Aerial surveillance is being increased, and authorities want to step up the pace of prosecutions and fines for the owners and operators of the ships. The coast guard estimates that oil spills annually kill 60,000 to 100,000 of the roughly 10 million seabirds that congregate off the Newfoundland coast each winter. Although the individual spills usually are small, the toll they inflict every three to four years equals the number of birds killed in the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Terry Harvey, manager of the coast guard's oiled wildlife project, said many of the spills are ordered by the captains of commercial ships to minimize the cost of pumping oily waste from their bilges when they reach port. ``This is usually a willful act of deliberate polluting,'' Harvey said Tuesday. ``The birds die horribly -- they can no longer feed themselves. They come ashore, starving to death and freezing to death, and hope for rehabilitation is lost.'' Barry Rothfuss, head of a New Brunswick-based wildlife rehabilitation organization, says Canadian authorities in the past focused too much on contingency planning for huge oil spills and too little on combating the innumerable smaller spills. ``It's the worst chronic oiling of wildlife in the history of North America,'' he said in a telephone interview. ``Fines should be stiffer and enforcement should be tougher.'' Although the law allows maximum fines of several hundred thousand dollars for violators, in practice fines have been infrequent and relatively modest -- often less than the cost of bilge pumping. The effect of oil spills are particularly severe around Newfoundland because of a unique combination of factors. It is a breeding ground for more than 20 species of seabirds, including petrels, puffins, gulls and sea ducks, and it encompasses the busiest trans-Atlantic shipping routes, where thousands of ships pass each year. Aggravating the problem is the cold water temperature. Experts say that causes the oil to stay sticky longer and increases the risk of hypothermia to the bird. Last week, Canadian authorities announced that the owner of a fishing vessel from the Faeroe Islands was fined $6,600 after pleading guilty to spilling oil off Newfoundland. That raised the number of successful prosecutions for marine pollution in Atlantic Canada to 30 in the past decade -- for a total of $270,000 in fines. Canadian authorities want to increase the amount of the fines and broaden enforcement efforts. Coast guard surveillance planes logged 400 hours of flying time over the Atlantic in 1998-99, compared to 250 hours the previous year. Aerial surveillance has limited effectiveness -- the area is vast and often shrouded by fog. One hope for the future is satellite surveillance -- an experimental project earlier this year succeeded in detecting oil spills in the wakes of some ships. AP-NY-04-13-99 1315EDT -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*- You received this because you are subscribed to "sust-mar", the Sustainable Maritimes mailing list. To unsubscribe, send email to <majordomo@chebucto.ns.ca> with "unsubscribe sust-mar" (without quotes) as the body of your message. To post a message to sust-mar subscribers, send it to <sust-mar@chebucto.ns.ca> Posts that are off-topic or excessive length (10K) will be rejected. For help contact <sust-mar-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>
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