Kerala is like a beautiful home in front of a highway. Once in a while, a truck may turn turtle in front. So if you want to, say, open an eatery and make some money, you would be bearing the risk of such an event. Singapore has very large crude carriers or VLCCs regularly passing through its congested sea lanes. The city-state is balancing the attending risks and revenues well.
In shipping, multi-million-dollar assets may pass by without touching the ports of a coastal state, without adding a dime to that country’s economy. But when one of these vessels goes belly up, the problem lands on its shores. This risk is built into the destiny of every coastal state abutting busy shipping lanes.
Vessels are flagged in different flag states, have different technical third-party inspectors, different ship managers and are vetted by different vessel charterers. Understandably, they have different levels of compliance to the same international conventions they follow—such as Safety of Life at Sea or Prevention of Pollution from Ships—in letter and spirit. Only vessels that call your ports can be subjected to physical scrutiny under a ‘port state control’ protocol.
Vessels, typically, do not carry oil spill response equipment. They flash their third-party insurance cover to compensate for the spills they cause. The wherewithal for this response must be stockpiled by the coastal state. Tackling an oil spill demands quick-response capabilities, and it is practically difficult to extend this cover to every inch of the coastline across various terrains.
Capacity building for stockpiling response equipment is an exercise funded by port operators. The approach is a tiered response strategy. Equipment is pooled between players in geographic proximity for bigger spills. No country is ready for the worst-case scenario.
The US, with all its resources, took time to cope with the Deep Water Horizon spill. That was an oil well. Oil leaked from the seabed over a period of time, giving space for the response machinery to understand and improvise on its strategy. This luxury of time will not be available for a tanker foundering on the coast. The deluge of oil will hit quickly.
On the positive side, tankers are double-hulled now, increasing the threshold for when an accident becomes a polluting incident. There is no dedicated response equipment available within the country for a major tier-3 accident. The nearest stockpiles are of an international subscription-based ‘co-operative’, OSRL, located in Bahrain and Singapore. Ideally, this should be in front of an Indian ‘highway’. Heavy equipment weighing tonnes should be truckable to any part of the coast within 24 hours. Locating a tier-3 stockpile within India will address an important strategic vulnerability.
Oil spill response technology has been ‘imported’ solutions so far. Slow to evolve, and not necessarily brilliant, but they are well engineered to be reliable, but with high costs. Time to get off this imported technology horse and let Indian technologies show the way. This sector is not really rocket science.
We are lucky. The vessel that sank on the Kerala coast is not an oil tanker—it had oil only in its fuel tanks. Lighter elements like diesel evaporate after a spill from the sea surface. Furnace oil is present in every vessel. This can become a ‘mousse’ or greasy and viscous in ambient temperature. Current response gear cannot handle that.
A vessel sunk can be out of sight, but not out of mind. The steel corrodes, and after a period of time, the oil will surface. Oil from the sunken vessel ‘Prestige’ was removed by unmanned intervention from a depth of 4 km. This set a new benchmark in human ingenuity.
Oil which floats can be contained, but the chemicals will dissolve into the water column and cannot be contained. Curtailing fishing to prevent its ingress into the human food chain is the only mitigating measure.
Specialised equipment must be kept handy. Radio transmitter beacons with magnetic attachment are required for adrift containers, so these containers are not ‘lost’, but tracked and recovered, wherever it makes a landfall. This is not the last instance when containers are lost in the water. Container ships are getting bigger.
In 2021, a vessel X-Press Pearl caught fire and foundered off the Sri Lankan coast. The nurdles or small plastic granules shipped in containers, coated the island nation’s entire southern coastline. There is no gear today to contain and skim nurdles on water. As this article goes to print, this author’s hurriedly designed equipment to skim nurdles on water and on the beach will be undergoing its first test.
Our Kerala home is in front of a shipping highway. A large number of vessels including large tankers will continue to sail past our coast. Let us realise, there is no getting away from this risk. Let us build up the wherewithal to deal with such shipping accidents. Let us develop our maritime economy to make fullest use of our geographic advantage and compensate ourselves for bearing this risk anyway.