Paradip port initiate steps to prevent oil spill

Ninteen days after Mongolian vessel MV Black Rose sank off the Orissa coast, the Paradip Port Trust (PPT) today initiated action for preventing oil spill from the vessel, official soures said.

"Paradip Port finalised the tender for the work -- plugging the air vents, sounding pipes and other holes of the sunken ship", an official release said.
    
Stating that the work had been awarded to the Vishakhapatanam based M/s J Enterprise & Dives, it said that the action would ensure that there was no leakage of oil from
the ship.

"Nature of work to be assigned to J Enterprise & Dives is to prevent oil leakage and not evacuation of oil from the sinking ship", PPT's deputy chairman Biplab Kumar said.

A separate global tender had been floated to extract oil from the ship, he said.

The global tender was scheduled to be opened on October 5, he said.
   
The vessel sank with 924 metric ton of furnace oil on the board. Of the 924 mt of oil, 900 mt were inside the double bottom tank fully secured and very safe, Kumar claimed. However, about 24 mt of oil, including grease, were inside the engine room.