Sea Alarm is delighted to have been named recently as a beneficiary of the Eight up fund-raising initiative. This is the brainchild of maritime lawyer Colin de la Rue, who this year has taken a Sabbatical from his partnership at law firm Ince & Co to climb 8 mountain peaks around the world in aid of 8 charitable causes.
Sea Alarm is pleased to announce that its agreement with Oil Spill Response has recently been renewed for a further 5 years. The original agreement created in 2005 gave Sea Alarm the means to set up and carry out a programme for developing European and global preparedness for oiled wildlife incidents together with governmental, oil industry, NGO and other stakeholders. The renewed agreement shows the oil industry’s ongoing commitment to playing its part in this process.
Sea Alarm was invited to make a presentation at the IPIECA Oil Spill Working Group meeting in London on 11 November. IPIECA is the global oil and gas industry’s association for environmental and social issues and its Oil Spill Working Group, created in 1987 is a key international industry forum working on improving oil spill contingency planning and response worldwide on behalf of its members. Sea Alarm is recognised as a Partner Organisation of IPIECA.
Sea Alarm”s Hugo Nijkamp has been invited to chair the “Case Studies – Wildlife Issues” session at the International Oil Spill Conference, to take place in Portland, Oregon in May 2011.
Sea Alarm was invited by Aramco Overseas to attend the RA ATUM 7 oil spill exercise in Alexandria, Egypt on 1-3 November. The large scale event was a combination of a table top and a field exercise, to practise a tier-3 oil spill response on the basis of the Egyptian national oil spill plan. Sea Alarm participated in the two day table top exercise and was positioned in the national environmental group of the Planning Section.
Sea Alarm was invited by DG Echo and the European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) to attend the Second joint Civil Protection and Marine Pollution Workshop on Co-ordinated at-sea and Shoreline Pollution Response on the 9th December in Brussels.
Although it has been operational for more than 1.5 years, on 23 October the Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend was formally opened by Prince Laurent of Belgium and the City of Ostende. Sea Alarm was also invited and presented its booth at the opening.
A second 2010 HELCOM RESPONSE meeting was held 13-15 October in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sea Alarm did not attend the meeting, but prepared a proposal for a working programme for oiled wildlife response preparedness together with WWF-Finland and Estonia. The proposal was presented to the meeting by Estonia and WWF-Finland and, after some discussion and suggestions for modification, was adopted.
Sea Alarm organised a second meeting with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend and ProBird Germany, to discuss wildlife response issues, especially the rehabilitation of oiled birds. The meeting took place in September at Mallydams Wood, one of RSPCA’s wildlife hospitals, and was attended by various people from the different key organisations mentioned. An earlier meeting in April 2010 demonstrated that it is useful to have regular exchanges of the details of the oiled bird rehabilitation protocols that each of the organisations uses.
On October 6, Sea Alarm hosted a half day training session for a German oil spill expert at its headquarters in Brussels. The expert, Rudolf Gade, who is Head of Unit for surface and coastal water affairs in the federal state of Lower Saxony, was participating in the European Maritime Safety Agency’s (EMSA) EMPOLLEX exchange programme and had indicated an interest in wildlife response.
In the early hours of 8 October, a chemical tanker YM Uranus collided with a bulk tanker some 100km southwest of the island of Ouessant, off the Brittany coast. At the time of the incident, in addition to an unreported amount of bunker fuel, the Uranus was carrying a cargo of 6000 tonnes of pygas solvent, a type of heavy gasoline. Although a lighter type of oil (and therefore less persistent once spilled), this type of product can still pose a risk to seabirds through interfering with feather waterproofing and causing skin burns or irritation.
Following an earlier discussion in 2009, Benoit Loicq from the European Community Shipowners Association (ECSA) visited the Sea Alarm offices in Brussels last September. The aim of this meeting was for both organisations to present their activities and look at areas of common interest. Mr Loicq explained the setup and programme of ECSA, which is an international association made up of the national shipowner associations in each EU Member State. ECSA works to promote and represent European shipping interests though specialised committees, including an Environment and Safety Committee.