NZ Oil Response Services On Alert

Salvage and container recovery operations on Rena will continue throughout the Christmas and New Year break, while oil spill response teams will remain ready to respond should more oil come ashore during the holidays, says Maritime New Zealand (MNZ). MNZ National On Scene Commander, Rob Service, said while oil spill response activity would be scaled back during the Christmas/New Year period to give teams a well-deserved break, they remained on call and ready to respond should more oil from Rena hit local beaches.  

 

Mr Service said the incident command centre would also continue to run over the Christmas break, but the staffing would be reduced to a core team.

 

This team would continue to monitor the movement of the oil sheen around Rena and continue planning for potential future releases of oil.  He said the service knows there is still oil on the wreck that the salvage team can't reach. They are ready to launch another large scale-response if and when that oil is released.

 

Response personnel in Tauranga would remain ready to respond to public reports of oil on the beaches, and the wider response team would be on-call and ready to return to Tauranga in the event of another large spill from Rena.

 

Salvors and staff from container retrieval company Braemar Howells would also continue to work through the holidays on removing and processing containers taken from the Rena.

Mr Service thanked everyone who had assisted with the Rena oil spill response as the year wound to a close.

 

Mr Service was one of the first oil spill responders to reach Tauranga, on 5th October 2011, hours after Rena ran aground and was responsible for declaring the event a Tier 3, or national level, oil spill response. Since that day, hundreds of people from throughout the country and the rest of the world have dedicated their time and energy to responding to New Zealand's worst maritime environmental emergency.