URGENT: REAL PRESS RELEASE ON OIL SOAKED NFLD. BIRDS

From: Screefing@aol.com
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 09:05:10 EDT
To: pfalvo@chebucto.ns.ca
Precedence: bulk
Return-Path: <sust-mar-mml-owner@chebucto.ns.ca>

next message in archive
no next message in thread
previous message in archive
Index of Subjects


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>


next message in archive
no next message in thread
previous message in archive
Index of Subjects