Black Days in Karachi

Two weeks ago, as everyone knows by now, a Greek oil tanker called Tasman Spirit entered the waters off the Karachi port. This ship was chartered by the PNSC to bring oil from the Emirates to Karachi, and a KPT captain was supposedly in charge of the ship as it made its way into the port. But something went horribly wrong, and the tanker ran aground barely a
nautical mile from the Karachi seashore on July 27th.

The KPT authorities did nothing about the situation – or at least the bare minimum to avoid looking completely inept, despite the fact that it was their captain who managed to miss the high tide and steered the vessel into shallow waters. A few half-hearted attempts were made to tow the boat away but they failed due to the rough seas of the monsoon weather.

They tried to siphon off the oil but that apparently didn’t work either. As it was, the KPT took it easy. They claimed that the oil leakage was minimal, that there was no danger of the ship breaking, or of the tanks bursting. All would be taken care of in good time, they assured us – and we sat pretty.

Every night, residents of Seaview and the beach area all the way to the apartment complexes near Bilawal House and the Indus Valley Art School could see the lights of the tanker as it sat forlornly in the water.

They twinkled reassuringly in the distance, adding to the illusion that all was normal. Still, there was a strange smell in the air, especially in the evenings, a faint smell reminiscent of diesel or petrol, as if too many oil trucks had driven by on their way in from the port to points north. On Tuesday evening, however, the smell grew stronger, and ominously, on the night before Independence Day, the lights of the tanker were switched off.

The news began to spread that the oil tanker had sprung vast leaks and was about to break into two. Panicked residents tuned into the news, but they found only the vaguest of information, with absolutely no instructions about what to do in case the worst happened and the tanker disgorged its entire load of oil – some 50,000 metric tons – onto the Clifton Beach. Meanwhile, the city was going wild with celebrations for Independence Day. The usual legions were making their way to the beach, thousands of people on buses, motorcycles and cars going to their usual merriment at the shores of the Arabian Sea.

As the realization began to dawn that this had turned into an emergency situation, the Rangers moved into action and began to close the beach down, turning away the revelers. Many were disappointed, and some more than a little mutinous. “We don’t care about the oil spill,” said one man whose motorcycle was impounded. “There’s pollution on the streets every day and we breathe that, so how can this hurt us?” But the authorities were taking no chances. They closed the fourteen-kilometer strip of beach down to the public
and blocked many of the roads leading up to the beach.

As a result, the people stood in the streets and waved their flags enthusiastically for the camera crews.

All through the night KPT and Navy personnel worked to contain the oil spill, which was now imminent as the tanker began to develop large cracks. Attempts to siphon off the remaining oil – reports varied between 10,000 tons (official version) and 48,000 tons (independent reports) as to how much oil was left on the ship – were abandoned, and the crew evacuated.

The authorities hastily called for emergency crews and ships from Singapore and England that would combat pollution and fight fire, for the two biggest fears were that fifty thousand tons of oil would swamp the beach, and that the tanker would explode on its way down, setting all those fifty thousand tons of oil ablaze. Chemical booms – large plastic barriers that formed a physical barrier to stop the oil as it floated slick and shiny on the surface of the sea – were put into place, and more were requisitioned, including planes would come to spray chemical dispersant on the surface of the water.

The next morning, it seemed that the holocaust had already arrived. The beach was covered in a thick layer of sludge, like tar, which would not evaporate, unlike gasoline. Dead turtles and fish were washed up on the shore. The sands of the beach had turned dark; the waters were filled with a black substance that made the waves look as if they were made of ink. The
smell of oil was redolent, causing many residents of Seaview to leave their homes. Those who stayed began to experience breathing difficulties, eye allergies, and throat irritation, as well as nausea and vomiting.

Camera crews who went to film the spillage and policemen on duty for twelve hours at a time came away reeling and retching from the stench.

The cover-up began almost at the exact time as the cleanup. KPT officials claimed that they had done nothing wrong, that there was nothing wrong with weather conditions, that the captain of the tanker had done nothing wrong. When asked why a twenty-two year old ship was allowed to enter Karachi waters when the cutoff point for ships was fifteen years and older, they claimed that they had allowed the ship based on its seaworthiness and other esoteric information that they used to make such decisions. They claimed that the oil leakage was “minimal”, and they even claimed that they had managed to remove the fifty thousand tons of oil from the ship, a statement that they later recalled. The amended statement was that they could not state how much oil had been removed “for insurance and legal reasons”.

Officials from the Ministry of Communication on Saturday also added their tall claims to the pile. The Minister for Communications, Mr. Ahmed Ali, stated at a Friday news conference at KPT’s head office that an environmental disaster had been avoided, that twenty thousand tons of crude oil had been removed from the tanker and that the remaining leakage had been contained. He has also ordered a high-level probe into the disaster. “There is no danger to the harbor and the beaches… nobody has been affected. The bad smell has evaporated and there is no bad smell at the moment.”

This was in direct contrast to reports in the newspapers that people were suffering from shortage of breath, asthmatic patients had run away from Seaview in droves, and that doctors were advising people to leave the area if they could. The minister also told reporters that birds were flying and sitting on the beach, which was proof that there was no danger to marine life as a result of the spill. Once the spill has stopped completely, authorities have promised that the boat will be towed away to deeper waters, where, should the spillage begin again, it will have less of an affect on the Karachi coastline. However, the KPT is releasing neither the name of the captain who ran the Tasman Spirit aground nor his whereabouts, and there is no chance that the man will be interviewed by reporters for his role in the disaster.

All fingers are being pointed towards the KPT and the PNSC for hiring the tanker, which has been found to have a dubious reputation, with several name changes and inaccurate information about its power and capacity as an oil transport vehicle. The KPT is also being blamed for not having done enough to salvage the tanker once it ran aground. According to newspaper reports, enough tugs were not engaged to pull the tanker away, and the KPT did not even ask the Pakistan Navy for larger pumps to remove the oil from its tanks. Despite the exorbitant fees it charges for use of port facilities, it seems to have no capability whatsoever for dealing with any kind of emergency situation, and whatever attempts were made before the tanker split in two, they seem to have been kept to an absolute minimum in order to hide the fact that they had, for lack of a better phrase, screwed up so royally.

Meanwhile the water at the Clifton Beach continues to wash onto the shore, bringing more and more of the oil slick onto the sand. The mangroves will be destroyed, fish will continue to die, and we can count on hearing mass suicides of the fishermen in a few months when they realize there’s nothing to catch and feed their families with. Schools in the area will open and children will attend their classes, wondering why they’re coming home with sore throats and headaches.

People will pretend that everything is normal and that the rainbows on the sand are some kind of new and beautiful natural phenomenon instead of the aftermath of disaster that they really are. The Black Days have returned to Karachi, but this time they have nothing to do with politics, but a slowly widening oil slick, that grows day by day to destroy everything that
Karachi holds dear, a gallon at a time.