Two children collecting oil on the Shela river in the Sundarbans yesterday close to where tanker Southern Star-7 went down on Tuesday, spilling oil in the eco-sensitive area. Photo: Pinaki Roy The forest department yesterday started removing oil-smeared plants and hyacinths from the River Shela and adjacent canals, deploying 200 workers and 100 hired boats. It will be Amavasya (new moon) in a few
days and the river water will rise at high tide submerging the forest floor. The slick would spread further if the oil-soaked plants were not removed now, said Abul Kalam Azad, an officer of Chandpai forest range. People living on the Shela river gathering oil in containers and buckets, near where Southern Star-7 went down on Tuesday, so that it could be sold. Photo: Pinaki Roy Pavel Partha, a botanist and ecology researcher, said if the oil is not mopped up properly, the food chain would be hampered, causing migration of many fishes, birds and mammal species. “To tackle oil spill, removing oil-soaked plant is more effective than using chemicals. Chemicals were used in tackling the Gulf of Mexico oil spill [in 2010], but it [the method] was never tested for any mangrove forest,” Pavel told The Daily Star after visiting the Sundarbans. A fishermen's net ruined by oil. Photo: Pinaki Roy Earlier, it was said that salvage ship Kandari-10 would spray Propylene Glycol Ether to increase the density of oil, which then will be swept away by fishing nets. But experts and officials from a joint meeting in Dhaka suggested not using any chemical for the oil spill clean-up. Since the oil slick started on Tuesday morning when Southern Star-7 carrying 3.58 lakh litres of furnace oil sank near Mongla, locals have collected only a few thousand litres so far. “We have bought 9,400 litres of furnace oil from the local people. We are expecting some more,” said Rafiqul Islam Badal, Padma Oil's agent who has been buying the furnace oil. Advertisement The authorities have asked the local people to collect the furnace oil and sell it to the Padma Oil Company agents. Locals have been advised to use fishing nets, sponges or any other manual means to collect the oil. "It has no commercial value as it can't be used, but we are making the offer to encourage people so that the cleaning up process speeds up," said Rafiqul Islam Babul of the Padma Oil Co. Meanwhile, Indian authorities were on alert yesterday after the tanker sank and dumped thousands of litres of oil into rivers of the Sundarbans. On the Indian side, Pradip Vyas, director of the Sundarbans Biosphere, said: "There are no reports till now that the oil spill has reached the Indian part of the Sundarbans." But Indian "wildlife officials have been deployed along the Sundarbans area bordering Bangladesh to check if the spill is spreading" as a precaution, he told AFP. Seeds of trees destroyed by the oil. Photo: Pinaki Roy In 2011, the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority opened a commercial shipping route through the Shela river despite opposition from environmentalists, an Indian wildlife official told AFP, on condition of anonymity. Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan, who visited the spot in the afternoon, said a decision on water vessel movement through the Shela river route will be taken at an inter-ministerial meeting today. The shipping ministry on Wednesday banned plying of any vessel through the river following the oil tanker capsize. BIODIVERSITY AT STAKE Talking to The Daily Star yesterday, Kawsar Sheikh, fisherman, said he found some dead shrimps and dead fish in Badamtoli canal. Shamsu Jamadar, another fisherman, said there used to be lots of dolphins surfacing in the Shela at the Joymunirgol point. But since the accident, he hasn't seen any. BBC added that footage shows birds covered in black liquid in the forest. "This catastrophe is unprecedented in the Sundarbans and we don't know how to tackle this," Amir Hosain, chief forest officer of the Sundarbans, told AFP news agency. People on a boat trying to scoop it up. Photo: Pinaki Roy "We're worried about its long-term impact, because it happened in a fragile and sensitive mangrove ecosystem." The Sundarbans, a Unesco world heritage site, is a vast river delta on the northern shore of the Bay of Bengal. Its mangroves and rivers are home to a vast array of plant and animal life, much of it unique to the region. The government declared areas in the southern Sundarbans to be a dolphin sanctuary in 2011, after research suggested some 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins lived in the area.
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