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Oil released from the wrecked tanker Braer off Shetland, which virtually
disappeared from view during storms late last week, is reappearing in brown
emulsified patches along the west coast of the island.

First sightings of widespread oily brown foam, included in reports from
aerial surveys made on Monday morning, bring fears that the pollution disaster,
far from being over, may only be entering a new phase.

‘The behaviour of the oil has confounded everyone,’ says John Baxter
of Scottish Natural Heritage. ‘A large amount of the 84 000 tonnes originally
on board the Braer is still somewhere in the system, probably diluted by
the water column. But we don’t know where.’

Speaking on Monday, he said: ‘It looks as if the oil, having been dispersed
in the water column, may now be coming back to the surface and beginning
to come ashore.’

Monday’s reconnaissance flights found oily sheens covering large areas
of the southwest coast of Shetland Mainland. In addition, pilots reported
finding ’20 per cent coverage of foam’ along the western coast of West Burra
island. The foam stretched 20 metres out to sea and was thickest in rocky
inlets. And there was ‘trapped brown foam along the entire coastline from
Kettla Ness to Siggar Ness’.

The foam represents the final appearance, almost two weeks later than
expected, of the oil-water emulsion called ‘mousse’ which is created when
winds froth up the oil into an emulsion with surface water. The government’s
Marine Pollution Control Unit had expected an emulsion to appear within
two days of the start of the spill. But apparently the winds and waves were
too rough for it to form until now, says Baxter.

He warned that the mousse was invading rocky inlets that had not been
covered by the thin sheen of oil that spread up the western coast of the
island last week. ‘This tale has a distance to run,’ he said. ‘We have no
sense yet of how far the oil slick dispersed during the storms. It could
have dispersed vertically in the water, rather than horizontally out to
²õ±ð²¹.’

Evidence that the oil has done damage to organisms on the seabed came
from divers who began a survey of 33 bays late last week, before the storms
returned. Marine Life Rescue, a group of British divers, found ‘quite large
numbers of dead urchins and razor shells’ at depths down to 20 metres off
Scousburgh, close to a bird reserve.

Mark Tasker of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee reported this
week that 1000 dead oiled birds had so far been recovered from the beaches
of southern Shetland and a further 300 were covered, oiled but still alive.
‘Around the west side of Sumburgh Head, virtually every bird inshore has
died,’ he said. They included hundreds of great northern divers, shags and
black guillemots.

Tasker warned that oil resurfacing after the storms could endanger more
birds. And there was another hazard. It emerged this week that the Braer’s
fuel oil is probably still aboard the broken-backed vessel.

‘This stuff will not disperse as quickly as the Norwegian crude,’ said
Tasker. ‘And if it drifts towards areas of coastline where there is still
plenty of life, such as the east coast, it could do a lot of damage.’