Tanzania finalising marine oil spill contingency plan

Government plans are at an advanced stage to implement a National Marine Oil Spill Contingency Plan in a move to curb pollution in Tanzania's territorial waters.
“Coastal environment is under pressure from inhabitants and visitors to the coast, maritime transportation activities in ports and shipping lanes...that’s why we speeding up the plan to protect marine resources,” said Infrastructure Development permanent secretary Omar Chambo at the opening of a workshop on the National Environmentally Sensitive Areas and the National Oil Spill Contingency Plan and the Environmental Policy on the use of dispersants.
The meeting was organized on Wednesday by the Surface and Marine Transport Regulatory Authority (Sumatra) with the objective of protecting coastal and marine areas from pollution, including oil spills and other related hazards.
The meeting was part of a regional project implemented by nine Western India Ocean countries - Tanzania, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Comoros, Sychelles and Reunion, South Africa and Mozambique - which are working together in making their coastal and marine areas safer for marine transport.
The PS described the national oil spill contingency plan, which is in the pipeline, as important tool for responding to oil spill and other marine pollution.
“An important component of the contingency plan is an environmental oil spill sensitivity ranking. This is key tool to the pollution response team in the mitigation of an oil spill or other marine pollution incident,” he said.
In this regard, he added, preparation of an environmental oil spill sensitivity ranking of the coastal areas of Tanzania could be useful in the finalization and implementation of the national marine oil spill contingency plan.
Describing the magnitude of the problem, he said, it is estimated that at any given time there are 50 ships in the major shipping lanes off the coast of Tanzania. Approximately nine oil tankers with capacities ranging from 50,000-250,000 tonnes sail through the shipping lanes daily.
“This coastal tanker traffic mostly passes 250 nautical miles offshore...pollution risks exist from vessel collisions and groundings both in the shipping lanes and port areas,” he said.
However, co-ordinator of the Western India Ocean Maritime Highway Development and Coastal and Marine Contamination Prevention Project (WIOMHP) Raj Prayg said that experts had already been deployed to assist Tanzania in drawing up marine resources protection plan.
The national oil spill contingency plan, according to the co-ordinator, seeks to make highly sensitive marine and coastal resources as a matter of priority. “That’s why we need to prepare an Atlas showing these environmentally sensitive areas. They need to be rated in terms of importance so that we may decide judiciously what to protect for it is practically impossible to protect everything,” he said.
According to the experts, Tanzania's oil spill contingency plan will be finalized at the end of this year and its implementation is expected to start in 2011.