June, 2009
In 1989 the Exxon Valdez struck a reef off the south coast of Alaska and spilled 40 millions litres of crude oil – enough to fill more than 10 Olympic sized swimming pools.
The pollution spread over 2,100 kilometers (1,300 miles) of pristine shoreline, killing 250,000 seabirds, nearly 4,000 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and more than 20 orcas. If another big spill happens in the Arctic, polar bears could all too easily join the casualty list.
So, in Norway, WWF and our partners have recruited, trained and mobilized more than 300 volunteers to help tackle oil spills on this scale.
Recently we helped to organize training at Svalbard, in the heart of the Barents Sea region which is home to about 3,000 polar bears. This covered everything from hands-on oil spill clean-up techniques like scraping and shoveling oil from beaches, to safety instruction and information on the environmental risks of coastal transport and the petroleum industry.
The extreme weather can make the going tough, but this effort has already proved its worth. WWF’s volunteers were central in the clean-up operation following an oil spill outside Bergen on Norway’s west coast in 2007, where they cleaned up more than 200 tons of oiled wastes.
Meanwhile, WWF campaigners are calling for offshore oil development in the Arctic to be suspended until adequate oil-spill clean-up technologies are in place. We are also working to have the most vulnerable and important areas of the Arctic made permanently off-limits to oil development.