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Bangladesh - Oil Spill in the Sundarbans National Park

Monday, December 15, 2014 21:22

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Posted Dec. 15, 2014 at 11:00 PM: On the morning of Dec. 9, 2014, a tanker carrying heavy furnace oil to a powerplant in Bangladesh was struck in the fog a cargo vessel and partially sank, releasing thousands of gallons of oil into the Sundarbans, the world’s largest continuous mangrove forest and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This tidal river delta, already threatened by climate change, is home to incredible biodiversity, including rare Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins and what is believed to be one of the largest populations of the very endangered Bengal Tiger.

From The Guardian: A Bangladeshi oil-tanker lies half-submerged after it was hit by a cargo vessel on the Shela River in the Sundarbans. The oil spill is threatening rare Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins as well as Bengal tigers that live in the region. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Details, including the exact location of the incident, remain vague, even though nearly a week has passed since the accident. The Times of India reports that while the accident occurred in a commonly travelled shipping lane, the collision occurred within one of the Sundarban’s three dolphin reserves.

The “Southern Star 7″ was carrying somewhere between 66,000 and 92,000 gallons (250,000-350,000) of furnace oil, but how much was actually spilled into the river remains unknown.

From The Guardian: Oil from a Bangladeshi oil-tanker is seen on the [Shella] River in the Sundarbans in Mongla. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Residents have been seen collecting the oil by hand and with buckets to sell for a small reward to the state run Padma Oil company, while fishermen attempt to use their nets to contain the spill. Regional officials just announced they are hiring 100 boats and 200 workers to expand the clean-up effort. These tedious and messy clean up methods are a stark reminder that even after the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska in 1989, the Ixtoc 1 spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979, and even the Santa Barbara Oil Spill off California all the way back in 1969, we haven’t really made any major improvements in how we clean up spilled oil.

We have been monitoring satellite images of the Sundarbans region, and while there isn’t much to see on the low-resolution daily imagery from MODIS, we think we might have found evidence of the oil and the actual location of the stricken tanker on radar satellite imagery.

Radar satellite image, acquired December 12, shows black ribbons that we think is some of the oil spilled in this disaster. The bright white spot indicated is consistent with multiple ships clustered together to lift the “Southern Star 7″ from the river bottom.

As this is a tidal delta, water sloshes in and out of the mangrove forest, and there are reports that the oil is continuing to spread up and down the river, and throughout the little canals and channels that crisscross the region. On radar satellite imagery, we have observed what appears to be oil along 34 miles of delta’s waterways.

We are still processing these radar satellite and Landsat images, and will update this post as we learn more…

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Source: http://blog.skytruth.org/2014/12/sunderbans-spill.html

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