95,000 Gallons Fuel Oil Spill In Sundarbans; Wildlife And Fish Dying As Children Scoop Up Oil

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Children scoop up the furnace oil from the Shela river and deposit it in a trench so that it could be sold later on. To help with the clean-up after the oil spill on Tuesday near the Sundarbans, the BIWTA had announced that locals could collect and sell the oil. The photo was taken at Badamtola near where the oil tanker had sunk. Photo: Courtesy

The air around the Sundarbans is thick and it smells foul. The black slick flowing down the Shela and Pashur rivers, covering grasses and plants on their banks, gives a feeling that it is not the world's biggest mangrove forest, rather an industrial city cursed by civilisation's waste.

Animals have started to die. The water hyacinths on the two rivers have turned black. Some Golpata trees have gone under heavy layers of oil. One local, Abu Jafar, spotted two animals -- a monitor lizard and an otter -- dead and smeared with oil along the banks of the Shela.

Meanwhile, the authorities pulled the sunken oil tanker ashore around 11:00am yesterday, some 30 hours after the accident. But all the 3.58 lakh litres of furnace oil the tanker had been carrying already spilled into the rivers and the adjacent cannels. The ship is now in safety, said M Giasuddin, managing director of the owning firm, Harun & Company. Two of the six containers of oil in the vessel were completely damaged, Giasuddin said. “We are checking to see if the four other containers are all right.”

As of last evening, the slick spread over a stretch of more than 60km -- up to Koromjal in the upstream and up to Kachikhali in the downstream. At least 20 canals connected to the Shela river were polluted.

EDIT

http://www.thedailystar.net/animals-start-to-die-54929