Tar on beach, and potholes on roads
Just as there can be no smoke without a fire, there can be no tar balls without an oil spill. When tonnes of slimy tar balls suddenly start to pile up on Goa’s beaches, you can be reasonably certain that a huge oil spill somewhere is responsible.
And when the authorities start to tell you that this is ‘normal’ during the monsoon, you need to ask how many times it has occurred during the last 20 years. Chances are that they don’t know. That’s because it isn’t ‘normal’ in the middle of the monsoon. Tar balls normally surface on Goa’s beaches just before the monsoon, when the South-West Monsoon winds begin to blow, create rough sea conditions and churning up the sea.
At present, this slimy muck is continuing to pile up on our most important beaches, which play host to roughly 2.5 million tourists each year. Even as the administration has started, belatedly, to clean the beaches, Director for Tourism Swapnil Naik has at least been honest enough to say that the tar balls are due to an oil spill ‘somewhere’ in the sea, and that he has no idea when they will stop washing up ashore.
Velsao beach in South Goa is the most badly affected; tar balls have piled up around a foot thick, making that part of the beach look like a huge, ugly rock. Yesterday, this newspaper carried a photograph of Sernabatim Beach, which appeared almost as bad.
Tourism Minister Nilkanth Halarnkar and Environment Minister Aleixo Sequeira, who visited the affected beaches yesterday, need to devise a strategy to protect Goa’s beaches. One cannot be complacent just because this is the off-season. If this had happened in the middle of the tourist season, it could have caused an exodus of tourists.
The National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) has confirmed that one of the most common causes for tar balls is the dumping of oil overboard by a passing ship. The lighter fractions of the oil evaporate, while the heavier elements mix with water to form a thick, sticky emulsion that looks like chocolate pudding. The wind and waves stretch and tear the patches of emulsion into smaller tar balls.
There seems to be a fair bit of unanimity that this mini-disaster has been caused by an oil spill. But what gives ships’ captains the idea that they can dump oil or wash out their bilges in India’s territorial waters or in its 200-km wide exclusive economic zone (EEZ)? It has to be India’s slack laws and their even slacker implementation.
Why was the oil spill responsible for these tar balls neither reported nor detected? Protecting our coastline and our beaches is the job of the Indian Coast Guard. But that is the one outfit that has remained significantly silent. India launches its own satellites and has among the best satellite imaging systems in the world. It should be perfectly possible not only to detect oil spills, but also identify the ships responsible for them, so that they can be made to pay dearly for the damage they cause. The tools are all out there. All the Coast Guard and the state government need to do is to get their act together.
Bank guarantee?
While the government’s idea of handing over the job of breaking up and towing away the MV River Princess to Salgaocar Mining Industries Pvt Ltd is the best option under the present circumstances, it could end in unmitigated disaster unless the company is asked to furnish an encashable performance guarantee, of at least the amount it would have cost for one of the other bidders to remove the ship.
Without solid collateral, the whole exercise could end in further and greater disasters.
