- Email: [email protected]
Polluted seabirds
Volume 10/Number 8/August 1979
imported a pollution control supervisor from Milford Haven. The completion of the ballast processing plant was brought forward to June, and it is now expected actually to be ready in August. Some £150 000 per year is already being spent on aerial supervision of tankers in Shetland waters, which will also be watched with infrared detectors and sidescanning radar at night, as a form of psychological warfare. A series of fixed barriers are to be installed as baffles at the side of the harbour entrance, which can then be closed with floating booms, though it is said it will still take 2 weeks to seal it off properly, a prospect which everyone still appears to regard with a curious reluctance. The pollution control authorities now have £500 000-worth of equipment in store, the largest stock in the country, and have even practised using it. People are now fined for spilling l0 gallons of oil. So far the oilspill is calculated to have cost £3.5 million. It is not clear what useful purpose has been served by this expenditure, but at least it has helped to keep people on their toes. The R.S.P.B. has published an anonymous letter from a member of the crew of one of the local vessels announcing that they have become converted to a belief in conservation. It is not entirely clear why it had to be anonymous and perhaps it would be useful to enquire into this next?
was able to detect the difference between a spill containing rhodamine dye and between heavy and light crude oil. The system can also be adopted to scan the surface of the sea simply to detect spills so that when the aircraft passes over a polluted zone the laser would trigger off an alarm.
-"'ltsamlng Ban in Italy Bathing has been banned along a 7-kin stretch of Tuscany coastline near Pisa - because of pollution in the River Arno which reaches the sea at the popular resort of Marina di Pisa. In previous years holidaymakers at resorts near Rome have been warned against bathing, but the beaches of Tuscany have been regarded as comparatively clean. Now the Mayor of Pisa, Sgr. Luigi Bulleri, has announced that sea pollution has resulted from the river Arno being excluded from state plans to clean up Italy's waterways, and in Rome, civic leaders have been accused by a magistrate of failing in their duty to tax industries in order to finance purification plants. The official reaction to this is that Rome is doing everything possible to enforce the law, and has already demanded the tax from 100 firms.
IV. R. P. B O U R N E
WWF Headquarters Move Polluted Seabirds There have been a growing number of repetitive reviews of the impactofpollutiononseabirds, most of which, I notice, fail to mention each other. One of the better ones prepared by H. M. Ohlendorf, R. W. Risebrough and K. Vermeer for the Seattle symposium on the'Conservation of Marine Birds of Northern North America' in May 1975 in the continuing scandalous absence of the Proceedings, has now been published as Wildlife Research Report 9 by the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service and may be obtained from the Division of Public Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. It is a thorough and balanced work of its kind, dealing with oil, organochlorines, heavy metals and, briefly, plastic and other artifacts, with the usual American emphasis on hypothetical remote biochemical implications of oil pollution, and in the absence of much useful new work is not yet greatly out of date. There is a useful bibliography.
The World Wildlife Fund is to have a new headquarters in the Swiss village of Gland, a few miles from Geneva. The building has been provided by a group of anonymous donors, and will be shared by the Fund with other international conservation groups, among them the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). WHF International Director-General, Mr Charles de Haes, says: " Gland will provide the world conservation movement with a long-needed focal point, and being in the same building with IUCN will give us immediate access to its scientific and technical knowledge and advice, so important in ensuring that we can channel our limited resources to the highest priority conservation ends." The new headquarters, expected to open early in 1980, will have modern conference, display and library facilities. "l'*lL
W. R . P . B O U R N E
Laser to Detect Oil Slicks Researchers at Canada's Centre for Remote Sensing (CRS) have developed a technique that not only analyses oil slicks in the sea from aircraft observation but which could also 'match up' a specific spill to the oil tanker responsible. A laser beamed down from the aircraft causes the chemicals in the oil to fluoresce, releasing ultraviolet rays which characterize the chemicals it contains, and providing records of the loads of tankers in the area can be obtained, ships that have caused spills could then be identified, The technique was recently tested with the assistance of NASA, the US Coast Guard and the American Petroleum Institute, and using specially prepared batches of oilthe laser
--
CONCAWE Report The oil companies' international study group, CONCAWE, has issued its annual report with the promise of a major on water pollution by refinery effluents to be published soon. The group, established in 1963 to investigate the conservation of clean air and water, has also added a new working area to its existing activities- Oil Spill Clean-up Technology (OSCUT). Through its new OSCUT advisory group, CONCAWE also plans to bring together existing expertise and put the results of relevant technical studies at the disposal of the oil industry. The group's work in this new field will complement the activities of ogranizations like the oil industry's International Marine Forum and the Exploration and Production Forum. Members will be looking at inshore and onshore clean-up and disposal techniques and liasing with
study
217
imported a pollution control supervisor from Milford Haven. The completion of the ballast processing plant was brought forward to June, and it is now expected actually to be ready in August. Some £150 000 per year is already being spent on aerial supervision of tankers in Shetland waters, which will also be watched with infrared detectors and sidescanning radar at night, as a form of psychological warfare. A series of fixed barriers are to be installed as baffles at the side of the harbour entrance, which can then be closed with floating booms, though it is said it will still take 2 weeks to seal it off properly, a prospect which everyone still appears to regard with a curious reluctance. The pollution control authorities now have £500 000-worth of equipment in store, the largest stock in the country, and have even practised using it. People are now fined for spilling l0 gallons of oil. So far the oilspill is calculated to have cost £3.5 million. It is not clear what useful purpose has been served by this expenditure, but at least it has helped to keep people on their toes. The R.S.P.B. has published an anonymous letter from a member of the crew of one of the local vessels announcing that they have become converted to a belief in conservation. It is not entirely clear why it had to be anonymous and perhaps it would be useful to enquire into this next?
was able to detect the difference between a spill containing rhodamine dye and between heavy and light crude oil. The system can also be adopted to scan the surface of the sea simply to detect spills so that when the aircraft passes over a polluted zone the laser would trigger off an alarm.
-"'ltsamlng Ban in Italy Bathing has been banned along a 7-kin stretch of Tuscany coastline near Pisa - because of pollution in the River Arno which reaches the sea at the popular resort of Marina di Pisa. In previous years holidaymakers at resorts near Rome have been warned against bathing, but the beaches of Tuscany have been regarded as comparatively clean. Now the Mayor of Pisa, Sgr. Luigi Bulleri, has announced that sea pollution has resulted from the river Arno being excluded from state plans to clean up Italy's waterways, and in Rome, civic leaders have been accused by a magistrate of failing in their duty to tax industries in order to finance purification plants. The official reaction to this is that Rome is doing everything possible to enforce the law, and has already demanded the tax from 100 firms.
IV. R. P. B O U R N E
WWF Headquarters Move Polluted Seabirds There have been a growing number of repetitive reviews of the impactofpollutiononseabirds, most of which, I notice, fail to mention each other. One of the better ones prepared by H. M. Ohlendorf, R. W. Risebrough and K. Vermeer for the Seattle symposium on the'Conservation of Marine Birds of Northern North America' in May 1975 in the continuing scandalous absence of the Proceedings, has now been published as Wildlife Research Report 9 by the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service and may be obtained from the Division of Public Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. It is a thorough and balanced work of its kind, dealing with oil, organochlorines, heavy metals and, briefly, plastic and other artifacts, with the usual American emphasis on hypothetical remote biochemical implications of oil pollution, and in the absence of much useful new work is not yet greatly out of date. There is a useful bibliography.
The World Wildlife Fund is to have a new headquarters in the Swiss village of Gland, a few miles from Geneva. The building has been provided by a group of anonymous donors, and will be shared by the Fund with other international conservation groups, among them the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). WHF International Director-General, Mr Charles de Haes, says: " Gland will provide the world conservation movement with a long-needed focal point, and being in the same building with IUCN will give us immediate access to its scientific and technical knowledge and advice, so important in ensuring that we can channel our limited resources to the highest priority conservation ends." The new headquarters, expected to open early in 1980, will have modern conference, display and library facilities. "l'*lL
W. R . P . B O U R N E
Laser to Detect Oil Slicks Researchers at Canada's Centre for Remote Sensing (CRS) have developed a technique that not only analyses oil slicks in the sea from aircraft observation but which could also 'match up' a specific spill to the oil tanker responsible. A laser beamed down from the aircraft causes the chemicals in the oil to fluoresce, releasing ultraviolet rays which characterize the chemicals it contains, and providing records of the loads of tankers in the area can be obtained, ships that have caused spills could then be identified, The technique was recently tested with the assistance of NASA, the US Coast Guard and the American Petroleum Institute, and using specially prepared batches of oilthe laser
--
CONCAWE Report The oil companies' international study group, CONCAWE, has issued its annual report with the promise of a major on water pollution by refinery effluents to be published soon. The group, established in 1963 to investigate the conservation of clean air and water, has also added a new working area to its existing activities- Oil Spill Clean-up Technology (OSCUT). Through its new OSCUT advisory group, CONCAWE also plans to bring together existing expertise and put the results of relevant technical studies at the disposal of the oil industry. The group's work in this new field will complement the activities of ogranizations like the oil industry's International Marine Forum and the Exploration and Production Forum. Members will be looking at inshore and onshore clean-up and disposal techniques and liasing with
study
217