A MyCapeTown selected video about Cape Town Shipwreck:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocOpTp_cbjs&fs=1&rel=0]
A ship that ran aground a South African beach three years ago is still threatening bird and marine life.
The Seli 1 was heavily laden with coal and oil when engine trouble led to it being wrecked on Blouberg Beach, Cape Town in 2009.
The lush white sands of Blouberg Beach have been blighted with the formerly Turkish-operated ship since it ran aground and was abandoned three years ago.
The most obvious question passers-by continue to ask themselves is ‘why is the wreak still there after all this time?’
J P Smith, who is on the City of Cape Town’s Mayoral Safety and Security Committee explains:
“The vessel was under-insured, the owners of the ship subsequently abandoned the vessel, and have refused to take responsibility for any of the costs, which meant that effectively the South African government had to deal with it.”
The South African government has already spent 27 Million Rand (US.3 million) removing about 800 tons of oil from the Seli 1.
But pockets of oil remain and there have been four oil leakages in the last three years.
Following incremental weather, the wreck has shifted and further deteriorated, leading to another oil leakage during the first week of September.
The City of Cape Town cleaned oil from Blouberg Beach within four days, but marine life is also affected.
Over 200 endangered African Penguins have been cleaned of oil by SANCCOB, the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, in Cape Town.
The oiled penguins are being brought in to SANCCOB from their nesting site on Robben Island, about seven kilometres (4.3 miles) from the ship wreck.
Volunteers, and full time bird rehabilitators like Romy Klusener need to take care when giving these sea birds a scrub.
Klusener says: “Especially if you have weak birds, you can’t wash for more than an hour at a time. If they start dropping, if they start getting weak, we stop washing straight away. A lot of the birds – if they’re really, really oiled, it takes more than one wash to get all the oil off of them. So we have to be really hands on, we have to be quite physical with the birds, and you always have to be aware of – you know, they are animals, they’re really stressed out a lot of the times.”
Once the penguins are cleaned, they get a chance to dry off.
SANCCOB then monitors the seabirds for two to three weeks before releasing them, if the conditions are considered favourable.
The African Penguin was recently reclassified from vulnerable to endangered, because their numbers are dwindling quickly.
In the last ten years there has been a 64% decline down to 20,000 breeding pairs.
One of the threats to their survival is oil spills, as SANCCOB CEO Venessa Strauss explains:
“Most people know that major oil spills is a concern for especially penguins, because they cannot fly, and they cannot get away from the threat. But chronic oil pollution as a result of ships dumping oil or wrecks leaking oil, such as the Seli 1 that we’ve just seen here in Cape Town, is a concern for us. We know that some animals that are oiled at sea never make it to land so it’s really difficult to quantify the impact of chronic oil pollution over the long term. We cannot only look at the numbers of birds affected by oil to quantify the impact, but we do know from research that many birds do die out at sea.”
Back at Blouberg Beach, resident Jeanette Atkinson says something needs to be done about the Seli 1:
“I would think that in the three years since the Seli has been there, surely something could have been done. It’s distressing for beach walkers, it’s distressing for the Penguins.”
The City of Cape Town has put in a request for 40 Million Rands (US.9 million) to deal with the on-going oil leakages and hopefully resolve the problem
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