Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission (HELCOM) announced that 63 sea accidents were registered at Baltic Sea last year, 18 of which took place in the territorial waters of Estonia. Last year, seven accidents at Baltic Sea happened with single-bottom tankers, four of them in Estonia’s territorial waters. Olev Luhtein, councillor of the Water Department of the Ministry of the Environment said that three of them were oil tankers and one was chemical tanker. „Fortunately no pollution was caused by these accidents, for in case of accidents chemical tankers are even more dangerous than oil tankers. Oil can be recollected from the sea, but chemicals can not. There are very few of them that remain on the surface, for most simply dissolve in the water. At the same time, Estonia is not ready to deal with a large-scale oil pollution at sea, because the team of the Board of Border Guard is short of necessary devices,“ Luhtein said. Most common causes of accidents were running aground or colliding. Luhtein states, that number of accidents in Estonia’s territorial waters is troublingly big, for these waters are just a small part of Baltic Sea. „Traffic in these waters is very dense and hence it is pretty dangerous zone,“ Luhtein acknowledged. To reduce the number of accidents in the future, in 2001, Estonia, Finland and Russia signed an agreement of co-operation to arrange a safer sea traffic at the Gulf of Finland, promising to develop a system for tracing ships by 07.01. 2004. The system will make it possible not only to trace ships but also to share important information with the captain. A report system is also to be started obliging any ship that enters the zone to announce it. T raffic-regulation schemes have also been worked out, aiming to secure safe movement of tankers at the Gulf of Finland. “Because the ship-traffic is continuously intensifying, we must start to regulate it more and more the way it is done on roads and highways”, Luhtein explained. On average, there are about 2000 ships daily at the Baltic Sea, about 200 of them are tankers. For additional information please contact: |
