The Sunderbans in Bangladesh continues to reel from a major oil spill after an oil tanker sank in the Shela river on Tuesday.
The tanker was retrieved on Thursday. Major impacts to this riverine mangrove forest habitat include threats to tigers, dolphins, otters, lizards, crocodiles, and the people living there.
These words sum it up:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/...
"This catastrophe is unprecedented in the Sundarbans and we don't know how to tackle this," Amir Hossain, the region's chief forest official, told AFP.
"The oil spill has already blackened the shoreline [and is] threatening trees, plankton, vast populations of small fishes and dolphins."
The Sundarbans is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and contains the largest mangrove forest anywhere in the world...
The mangrove forests straddle the border between Bangladesh and India and are home to rare animals including Irrawaddy dolphins and around 400 Royal Bengali tigers, the largest such population on earth.
However, the region is now facing "a huge disaster due to ineffective attempts to tackle the oil spill," according to Bdnews24, a Bangladeshi news site.
Stories are unfolding that hint at high risks to people, including children, living in the area:
http://www.voanews.com/...
The Dhaka Tribune said Friday "very little" has been done so far "in tackling the environmental disaster" because local officials have not decided on an oil removal plan, including whether to use dispersants.
The newspaper said authorities have asked local people to manually collect furnace oil from the water's surface as it spreads through a wide network of rivers and channels in and around the forest.
A spokesman for Padma Oil Co., which owns the sunken barge, said the firm would buy any oil collected by villagers.
"It has no commercial value as it can't be used, but we are using the offer to encourage people so that the cleaning up process speeds up," said Rafiqul Islam Babul, according to the AFP news service.
"Villagers, including children, are going out onto the river in boats to collect the oil floating on the water using sponges, shovels and spoons," he added.
Stories indicate a major disaster with few solutions in sight.
http://ibnlive.in.com/...
No official estimate was issued on the extent of oil spillage but sources said it might have spread over 50 km on the waters of Shela where the tanker sank, and Pashur rivers.
Authorities, meanwhile, ordered an intensified campaign to remove oil from the waters as it had spread quickly through a wide network of rivers and channels in and around the forest. Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan said powdered chemicals would be sprayed from a vessel to subside the oil so that the risk of oxygen reduction in the water could be minimised...
The forest officials...began the use of fishing nets to sweep away oil since last night while the local administration also asked the residents at the neighbourhood to collect oil and sell the substance to the state-owned Padma Oil Company to get back incentives.
The government shut down a riverine route pierced through the Sunderbans for movement of vessels "until further order". The measures came following an overnight inter-ministerial meeting with the shipping minister amid calls from environmental activists to ban commercial vessels in the routes in and around the Sunderbans...
Locals said they spotted several forest animals like lizards and otters floating dead near the river banks. The scene of the accident is known as a sanctuary for dolphins and different rare aquatic animals and fishes.
The Sunderbans forest, which covers 26,000 square km in India and Bangladesh, is also the habitat of famous Royal Bengal Tigers.
More on wildlife concerns:
The incident occurred near the UNESCO's World Heritage Site Sundarbans forest - of which 60% is in Bangladesh and the rest in India - home to the world's largest tiger reserve.
More than 400 Bengal tigers - declared an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 2010 - are believed to live in the area.
Only 3,000 tigers are left in the wild, down from over 100,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.The remaining global population is under severe pressure from poaching and loss of natural habitat...
Rubayat Mansur, Bangladesh head of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, said:"I visited the sunken trawler this morning. Only few hundred litres of oil remain inside, so almost all the oil has spilled into the Sundarbans."
He added that oil dispersants were "not appropriate for the mangrove ecosystem" and urged local villagers to help collect the oil from nets that have been placed in the river to contain its spread.
Rare Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins are also threatened by the spill.
How do we, as a planet, as people on this earth, ensure prevention and preparedness so these stories will not be repeated over and over and over until so much is lost?
This was a good place, where people lived right with the land. An oil company tanker and a cargo ship collided here in this amazingly special place. The consequences will be long-lasting.