Oil spill inquiry still going nowhere

Oil spill inquiry still going nowhere

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

As the environment on several islands in Kepulauan Seribu regency
continues to deteriorate, the Jakarta Police have yet to show
significant progress in their ongoing 10-month investigation of a
serious oil spill in the regency.

Police investigators collected another set of samples on Oct.
23, but the results will not be known until late November,
according to the police laboratory. In addition, they have said
they need more time to collect samples from oil rigs belonging to
the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) and Beyond
Petroleum Plc. (BP) as well as from the oil tankers that
regularly ply the waters in the regency.

"If the laboratory results show evidence that the samples
contain raw oil, we will take more samples from CNOOC and BP oil
rigs," the city police environmental division chief Adj. Sr.
Comr. Ahmad Haydar said over the weekend. "If they contained
large amounts of processed oil, most likely they came from
passing tankers."

The extraordinarily slow pace in investigating the pollution
case has been criticized by Sumarto, head of the Kepulauan Seribu
National Marine Park.

"Oil pollution has been an issue here for decades. But, the
latest ones have spread into wider areas even reaching Pramuka
Island (over 30 kilometers off the coast of Jakarta)," he said.

Sumarto cited deteriorating condition of the sea turtles as a
key indicator of the worsening environment. "There has been a
sharp drop in the number of sea turtle eggs from 4,363 eggs per
year on average to only 2,620 this year."

He said there had also been a larger than normal number of
problems with the eggs.

"From the 2,620 eggs, 905 did not have embryos, 110 eggs had
dead embryos inside and four of them were abnormal. The four died
within a week after hatching," he said, adding that he had never
seen such a phenomenon.

Sumarto also lamented the fact that the CNOOC and BP oil rigs
did not have suitable equipment to clean oil spills in the
shallow sea.

"They only have deep sea cleaning equipment. If they had
suitable equipment, the cleansing process would have been
faster," he said.

However, the oil and gas upstream regulatory agency (BP Migas)
spokesman Amir Hamzah said that the agency regulations did not
stipulate that CNOOC or BP had to have shallow sea equipment.

"The companies' area of operation is in the deep sea. It was
unfortunate that the pollution occurred. But it is uncertain
whether the oil spills originated from their operations," he
said.

Amir said the agency's laboratory tests revealed that the oil
spills in October had different characteristics from the samples
taken from the CNOOC and BP platforms.

"The oil spills probably came from passing oil tankers, so it
was not our responsibility."

To pursue the responsible party, the Ministry of
Transportation's Directorate General of Sea Transportation is
looking for possible suspects.

"We have been investigating the pollution case. We are looking
into the possibility that it was caused by passing tankers,"
director general Tjuk Sukardiman said.

He said a division under his directorate had been collecting
facts and reports from their monitoring posts on the islands. "We
do not have any leads so far, but we're working on it."

Tjuk said if the responsible tanker was found, the directorate
general would arrest the tanker operator and hold them
accountable.