Treasure Oil Spill

The Treasure sinks

The iron-ore ship, the Treasure, sank early on Friday 23 June 2000  in Table Bay about 30km from Cape Town, 8 km northwest of Melkbostrand. It sank approximately 20 km north of the African Penguin colony on Robben Island, and about 40 km south of the colony on Dassen Island. 

1300 tons of fuel oil leaked from the ship - the slick drifted initially to Robben Island and then later back toward Dassen Island. 

With the major breeding colonies on Robben and Dassen islands surrounded by oil from the sunken ore carrier 'Treasure', over 50,000 adults and 20,000 chicks were threatened with certain death from starvation or exposure which inevitably follows oiling – unless the birds were cleaned and rehabilitated. 'An estimated 44% of the world population of African penguins were affected,' according to Dr Rob Crawford of the South African Department of Marine and Coastal Management.

Some photos of oiled penguins on Robben Island

All photographs on this page are copyright Les Underhill

Collecting the oiled penguins

The scale of the disaster was enormous and well beyond the immediately available capacity.  SANCCOB has space at its site north of Cape Town to look after a maximum of 3,000 oiled birds.  However, in this spill over 20,000 birds (mostly from Robben Island) were oiled in the first few days and a further 23,000 or so threatened with oil at Dassen Island. 

Salt River Centre

The oiled penguins were rounded up and transported by ship, helicopter and road to the mainland.  SANCCOB's main rescue station (which could handle around 3,000 birds) quickly reached capacity and a new, temporary rehabilitation unit was created in a disused railway shed at Salt River in Cape Town - this new site was equipped with hundreds of plastic paddling pools and pens were constructed from a variety of barriers ready to receive the penguins. At its peak there were 20,000 penguins at Salt River.

Volunteers

To care for and feed the penguins volunteers from South Africa and abroad worked day and night washing the birds, preparing their fish and feeding them - about 400 volunteers were on duty at any one time.

The Relocation Programme

As the oil spread north it seems inevitable that a further 20,000 penguins from Dassen would also be oiled - but there was no possibility of finding anywhere to house or treat these birds so the birds were simply fenced on Dassen Island to prevent them going to sea where they would surely be oiled.  However, you can only keep penguins fenced up and unfed for a few days and the oil kept on coming.  This was when the decision to evacuate the birds was taken. All the 22,000 as yet un-oiled penguins were rounded up from Dassen and Robben Islands and evacuated in sheep trucks to Port Elizabeth. These birds swam back to their home colonies taking between 10 and 20 days to make the trip which was just enough time for the authorities to clear the oil away.

Hand-reared chicks

As the spill occurred at  the height of the breeding season many thousands of chicks were abandoned. Some 3,000 un-oiled chicks which were nearly fully grown were taken to the mainland and hand reared in two or three specialist units. 

Success and long term monitoring

Once the penguins had been cleaned and were shown to be waterproof again, so they were released back into the wild. It took until mid September before all the healthy birds were released.  In the final analysis more than 90% of the oiled birds were successfully released back into the wild. This is by far the highest success rate for any sea bird oiling incident.