TALLINN - Clean-up ships swarmed the Bay of Tallinn on March 17 after the Estonian Border Guard detected large amounts of shore-bound oil floating in from the Gulf of Finland. Finnish vessels gathered about two tons of spilled oil in an area situated between the Gulf of Finland islands Naissaar and Aegna near Tallinn by the afternoon of March 17.
But a pollution reconnaissance flight carried out on March 19 showed that in several places the oil slick from Runner 4, a freight ship sailing under the Domican flag, had arrived within less than 100 meters of the Estonian shore.
The Runner 4 sank on the night of March 5 near Vaindloo Island in the Gulf of Finland. The accident resulted in the slick currently drifting toward the Bay of Tallinn. According to provisional reports, oil slicks were detected 2.5 kilometers from the Miidurand shore in the Bay of Tallinn and one kilometer from shore in the neighboring Bay of Kopli.
Five days after the first reported spill on March 6, the border guard spotted two more slicks off the Parispea peninsula, 42 kilometers from where the cargo ship had sunk. In addition, rescue rafts and an emergency buoy from the Runner 4 were found in the area.
Immediately after the pollution was detected, Finland dispatched a team of clean-up ships and the Estonian Border Guard sent its aircraft to monitor the area. By the evening of March 17, approximately 300 liters of oil off the north Estonian coast had been collected, a border guard spokesperson reported, adding that this was only a small amount. The Finnish boats Seili, Hylje and Halli continued to work through the night.
The bay's oil-soaked icecap exacerbated the problem, as the Finnish ships' equipment was only designed to work in water. Estonia's clean-up vessel, the EVA-316, possessed similar equipment.
During a monitoring flight on March 15, Finland's Dornier aircraft detected a major area of pollution 16 kilometers northwest of the Juminda peninsula. A second slick was spotted nine kilometers north of Keri Island.
"A model of currents and the movement of ice allows us to make a 36-hour forecast of the drifting pollution. According to the prognosis, the northeast shore of Prangli Island could be under threat. It cannot be ruled out that the pollution will reach the shores of Naissaar as well," senior researcher Urmas Raudsepp said at the time.
He added, however, that this forecast was not 100 percent accurate, and that the oil's movement could vary. "But agencies should be on full alert for such an eventuality," Raudsepp said.
Over the past two months, the Bay of Tallinn has been tarnished by a record-amount of oil pollution, which has become Estonia's biggest environmental disaster.
A spill detected on Jan. 30 killed 35,000 birds and blackened Estonia's northwest coastline. The government was heavily castigated for its incompetence in handling the mess, and Environmental Minister Villu Reiljan nearly lost his job as a result.
Experts claim the gulf's increase in plying traffic is the main cause for tanker crashes and, unless monitoring efforts are made, could continue to pose a serious environmental threat to the area.
Finnish media castigated both Estonia's clean-up effort and its overall preparedness to handle such environmental disasters. The March 20 edition of the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat wrote that "Estonia's readiness to control marine pollution was practically nonexistent. Estonia does not yet have the necessary equipment to collect oil in frozen-water conditions, but they knew that help was coming from Finland," the report continued.
Estonia's foot-dragging, the paper opined, was due to its unwillingness to pay for the operation. "The reason was not the Estonians' national pride but economic considerations. The party asking for assistance will have to pay for it. So the Estonians remained waiting for the Finns to offer their help," the paper wrote.
It was in the Finns' own interest, the paper stated, to assist in collecting the oil, as wind conditions could re-route the Estonian-bound slicks toward Finland. The Finnish Institute of Environment both initiated and agreed to fund the clean-up project.
