Muckraking

I spent much of my weekend taking photos of an oil spill. The fuel oil was heavy and thick as it washed up on a beach near Algeciras, a port city in southern Spain. It was nauseating and smelt strongly of sulphur. Cleanup teams sweated under white overalls as they scraped the black gunge into thick plastic bags and piled contaminated sand into foot-high mounds ready for collection.

This, unfortunately, is not a rare sight in this part of the world. The Strait of Gibraltar is one of the world's busiest maritime choke points and shipping activity here is intense. There have been some dramatic incidents here in recent years, major casualties where ships have foundered and been lost to savage seas. But most maritime accidents are mundane. Just like the one that caused this latest spill.

The MSC Shenzhen, a large container ship operated by a reputable owner, was edging into a dry dock near the port of Algeciras when it bumped the quay wall. Somehow, the impact punctured one of the vessel's fuel tanks and out poured its contents. They sealed off the dry dock quickly and trapped most of the oil inside. But not before around 12 tonnes of the stuff leaked into the bay outside. Here's a video of the ship inside the dock. It's not great, but you can see how fast the stuff was pouring out.

Back on the beach, the sticky mess caused an uproar in the green camp. Campaigners renewed calls for tighter controls on shipping and an end to refuelling operations at anchorage in the bay. The bay, said one lady from Greenpeace, had become a toxic dumping ground. It sounded terribly dramatic, but it was off the mark.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm no friend of dodgy shipping. In fact, when I was a staff reporter at Lloyd's List, the London maritime daily, writing about crooked shipowners was my pet subject. I also write a lot about environmental issues in this region, even here on dscriber. The Strait of Gibraltar is an area rich in biodiversity and it needs all the protection we can give it. Underneath those ships anchored in the bay is a beautiful and diverse habitat that needs looking after.

Let's get some perspective on this latest spill: I spent two years of my life writing about the Prestige disaster, including weeks at a time on the beaches of Galicia. Compared to that spill, this weekend's was a mere splash. Even so, it was messy. We don't know what caused it yet and I've seen this sort of thing too often in the past to start pointing fingers one way or another this early on.

My problem with green groups is that they too often jump to conclusions while forgetting that ships, rather than being the big polluters they'd have us believe, are in fact the greenest form of transport on the planet. Yes they pollute when things go wrong, but there's another side to that coin too. Campaign for cleaner seas, by all means, but do it with a sense of perspective and context.

It's a fact that most pollution in the marine environment comes from land-based sources. It's also a fact that if you compare how much freight is carried on a ship to how much fuel it burns, you'll see maritime transport is pretty eco friendly. That's why the European Union, for example, is encouraging a modal shift from road to sea and rail.

And that's why I'll stick up for the maritime sector whenever I can, even as I throw away yet another pair of ruined, oil stained shoes.

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Photos by Brian Reyes