What Could the North Sea Crash Mean for the Environment?

Two ships have collided in the North Sea as they continue to burn there are fears of an environmental disaster so how bad could it get Donald Trump is heading back to the White House together we can truly make America great again we are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four years and we’re going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days we’ll be bringing you the latest updates and Analysis it’s first thing every morning so join me James Matthews me
Martha KET and me Mark stone for Trump 100 every week day at 6:00 a.m. wherever you get your podcast so long has collided with tanker Stena Immaculate in the outer Anchorage both vessels are abandoning just before 10 on Monday morning the cargo ship soong crashed into the Sten imaculate an oil tanker that was anchored off the coast of East Yorkshire now thankfully all but one of the crew on board the vessels were recovered but attention obviously now turns to the potential environmental effects and they could be
catastrophic Thomas mo is our science correspondent and he joins us from uh England’s East Coast but you might be better place to tell us specifically where you are Thomas and why I am at the rspb Reserve at bton cliff it’s extremely windy is very important for nesting seabirds half a million will be gathering here along these Cliffs it’s about 100 m down to the Sea here the waves are really beginning to pick up as the wind blows in from the north now over on the horizon is the site of the Collision we
can’t see it from here but of course these seabirds are feeding far out to sea as they prepare uh to to have their young in the next few weeks so this is an area where people are very concerned about the impact that This Disaster could have on Wildlife talk to me about these two vessels the solong and the the the Sten Immaculate because a lot of the environmental concerns stem not just from the the fuel that they would be carrying to to power the ships of course but what they were carrying is Cargo yes indeed so the tank was
carrying jet fuel or kerosene that’s a very light kind of oil uh and it is extremely explosive which is why we saw an intense fire yesterday but also if it gets onto the surface of the water it tends to evaporate quite quickly so any environmental consequences would be quite localized around the site of the Collision but there is this other aspect the the heavy fuel oil that powered the ships now that’s a much stickier tar like uh fuel uh and that does clog the feathers of birds and the fur of of seals and so on and that can cause
horrible consequences for them they can’t uh insulate themselves against the wet and the cold uh so hypothermia would be a huge issue for for them as well as of course the toxic nature of the the oil itself so this is something that would be a big concern if there was a significant slick that did move towards land and of course when you’re dealing with birds here I mean they nest on these Cliffs but they are feeding miles offshore and that could be in the area where there might be an oil slick there had been concerns that the the
cargo vessel the so long had been carrying sodium cyanide look any mention of cyanide in people’s ears are going to prick up but that seems to have gone away yes as we understand it it may be that there were containers on board that had in the past contained Cyanide and those were being monitored but there was no bulk quantities of cyanide on board according to the ship’s owners but what we don’t really know is what was in those containers we don’t know the full cargo manifest and certainly the
Maritime and Coast Guard agency will be going through that very carefully so they can understand what they’re up against and what impact that might have for the the birds that live here and the the seals the Atlantic gray seals they’ve just finished uh pupping uh and they will have young uh very close to shore so they too uh would be vulnerable to any pollution that does come their way just talk a little bit more about this this heavy fuel oil this sticky stuff as as you were mentioning a moment ago now as we understand it both those
vessels remain on fire so so we probably don’t have even a rough idea of how much fuel oil might be at risk of leaking into the waters well that’s right even when the fire’s out there will be so much hot methal it’ll be very dangerous to get too close uh and while there remains that uh potential for further jet fuel leaks and and another explosion they will be very very careful but they will want to assess uh how much is getting into the water now slick can be seen from the air we know that the Coast
Guard has been uh flying over uh the site of the Collision trying to monitor what’s needed they do have booms uh that they can put in the water and also dispersal agents that they can spray from from the air they will want to make sure that there is no lingering contamination of the marine environment because this is a really important fishing area not least is the the largest lobster fishery in Europe so you got the livelihoods of an awful lot of families that are at stake if there is longterm contamination of the seabed
around here okay so so let’s speak to someone who who knows even more than Thomas uh about the wildlife in the area David Craven uh works with the Yorkshire Wildlife trust and he joins us now David this this must be your your worst nightmare yeah I think that’s a fair way of putting it I mean I think when I came to work for York Wildlife trust which is about seven years ago one of the things that attracted me was that I was going to come and work with some of the places that I love most that I’ve grown up
going to since I was a kid places like sperm point and flamber cliffs and I would have always hoped I never be in that situation where we were dealing with this sort of spill this sort of incident where we were worried about exactly what was going to be the impact but yeah this is where we find ourselves describe the area to is then and the wildlife my son and I have actually been down on on the cliffs that we were just speaking to to Thomas from a top of but but those who haven’t been to the area just describe it so I think a really
good place to start is to talk about flamber Cliffs the actual first piece of conservation legislation that was ever passed anywhere in the entire world was passed in the UK 1869 it was the conservation of seabirds act and it was passed to protect the birds that lived at flamber Cliffs that’s how important that Headland is it is fundamental to the entire history of conservation of Wildlife and it’s so important because basically you get this perfect array of circumstances what you get is you have the cliffs themselves which are the
perfect home for an array of species including things like Puffin gilot Razer Bill ganet Kitty wake all these Coastal Specialists and then off those Cliffs you get nutrient upwelling in the waters which creates a rich place for small fish like sandals to live and that creates the food source that allows those birds to come back every single year and breed and create the next generation and they are incredibly sight specific they stay and breed in the same place come back year after year we’re talking about birds which can live for
15 to 20 years there can be breeding for 15 plus years so anything that sort of threatens that environment is really significant because you are talking about species which are all either threatened or endangered how close then is the the sight of the Collision of these two vessels to to those parts of the coastline that you’re just describing then so it’s about 20 mi or so off the coast and then it’s a little further south from flamber at the moment the way we’re looking at this and the way we’re looking at the sort of wind
patterns and the tide patterns and stuff like that we don’t think flamber is immediately in any sort of threat itself because it’s going more in a southernly direction however fish move over a large patch of water they don’t obey a little line where we may draw sort of protected zones nature Reserves things like that probably more a threat than flamber is actually the Humber Esty and the reserves that we manage such as sperm point and also that our colleagues at Lincoln sh have trust manage down around
sort of places like Don and N we focused mostly of course on on the bird so far but but you mentioned the fish in the sea there’s also mammal life in the Seas off the coast of England at this part as well yeah it’s it’s an incredibly Rich sea people don’t necessarily think of the North Sea as being this sort of wildlife Rich Haven but it that is exactly what it is and as well as all the seabirds as well as incredible fish nurseries which depend on things like the kelp forests and The seagrass
Meadows you’ve also got the marine mammals which we’re seeing increasing numbers on the Yorkshire Coast that’s gone from sort of the seals which we’ve had for quite a long time we’ve started to see ppers coming in and increasingly now we see every single year we see dolphins and we see an array of whale species from the things we expect to see that we’re used to seeing like the minky whales we’re also seeing these things like uh humback whales for example which there was worn off scaron a couple of
weeks ago so again anything that’s impacting this marine environment is a huge threat to all of these sort of things because in nature everything is interconnected so a influx of toxic material into an environment it starts at the bottom of the food chain and it works its way up and what’s really concerning is that what we know happens is that the top of that food chain because they eat so many different things anything that’s maybe in a small quantity in one fish will accumulate in massive quantities in things like marine
mammals which will eat hundreds and thousands of those fish so so just to be absolutely clear David even if this this toxic material doesn’t make its way all the way to the coastline there could still be very significant environmental impacts as a result of the crash it’s certainly possible yeah I mean at the moment we’re all sort of crossing our fingers and really hoping that the speed of the response and the quality of the response is what we think it looks like and that will hopefully really significantly contain this and
mean that we don’t get anything like the significance that maybe we were fearing only 24 hours ago but it’s impossible for there not to be some impacts we’re just hoping it’s smaller impacts rather than bigger impacts and maybe something that we feel in a short shock as opposed to the sort of long months of of dead birds washing up on a coastline for example so one of the efforts to save as much of the wildlife as possible let’s head back to Thomas Moore at top bton Cliffs at Thomas who is technically in
charge of this operation then well it’ be the maritime and Coast Guard agency working with uh other organizations that would be trying to contain the oil if the oil does come ashore uh if there is a significant quantity then there are contingency plans that all the wildlife uh groups along this sure have collaborated on to draw up and they Sly I know that they had a meeting last night just to make sure that uh they were prepared they can call on a large number of volunteers who would be bringing in oiled birds and seals that
were in distress and so on but they can’t bring them into these Wildlife hospitals they’d have triage centers where they can be assessed the numbers can be recorded because that’s an important part of the process but then an attempt will be made to try and get any oil or contaminants off their feathers uh and restore them to health and sometimes that’s not possible so sadly if this is a large pollution event it’s likely that some animals would sadly be euthanized it certainly is a possibility a very strong
possibility if if if the tides turn I’m I’m just wondering Thomas just as a nation do we have much experience of dealing with with cleanups like this I I was racking my brains to try and think of the last time something like this happened well the last one I can think of was the Brer tanker I think that was back in the late 1980s uh and that was uh a gasoline uh so again a relatively light uh oil that it was carrying so it did evaporate and even though it was closer to shore uh than the the Collision this time there
wasn’t too much damage the some of seals uh did get oil on their fur uh but there doesn’t seem to have been any long-term uh contamination of the area although it was very very carefully monitored because again Fisheries were were an issue I I I suppose this is probably how long is a piece of string question but but in terms of a cleanup operation we we won’t be talking hours and days will we well we don’t really know how big this cleanup operation will be or if there will be one at all it just depends
whether there is a significant amount of pollution now I am being blown from behind time there is a very stiff breeze coming from the North and the according to the Met Office the waves will increase in height now both those two will tend to help disperse any uh pollution but it also push it further down the coast not necessarily in towards the east coast towards Yorkshire and linkshire perhaps further down towards north nor but where exactly at lands what’s in its way that’s yet to be determined but people all along this
Coast line are monitoring wildlife and getting ready should there be a need to bring out all those decontamination procedures I suppose what we do take from incidents like this is is a reminder a reminder of just how dangerous it is for ships to be carrying toxic substances or indeed fuel oil and be involved in a crash so close to shore yes but then the tanker was due to come into the Hester that’s where it was waiting for its birth that’s why it was anchored uh so we all use oil uh now many people aren’t happy about that but
the fact is we rely on our modern lives for oil at the moment as we transition away from that but it does mean that oil necessarily has to come in offshore so there is a risk it’s how you reduce that risk so is acceptable so situations like this don’t happen again in future thank you Thomas that’s a lot for this edition of The Daily we are back again [Music] tomorrow Donald Trump is heading back to the White House together we can truly make America great again we are in for an unpredictable but fascinating four
years and we’re going to be following every twist and turn for the first 100 days we’ll be bringing you the latest updates and Analysis first thing every morning so join me James McKew me m helck and me Mark stone for Trump 100 every weekday at 6:00 a.m. wherever you get your podcast