A vessel carrying diesel wrecked on Saturday in the fragile Galapagos Islands, in Ecuador's Pacific and World Natural Heritage Site, so a contingency plan was activated in the face of a possible emergency, officials said.
“The privately owned Albatroz vessel was wrecked on Santa Cruz Island, Puerto Ayora (capital), carrying diesel,” state oil company Petroecuador said in a statement, without specifying how much fuel the ship was carrying or how much it was spilled.
“A contingency plan was activated and two sections of containment barriers were delivered, to surround the boat and mitigate the effects of the shipwreck,” he added.
The incident did not leave any victims either. “The four crew members of this boat are alive,” he added.
The Galapagos National Park (PNG) indicated on Twitter that “in the face of the sinking of a diving boat in Bahia Academia, #NuestrosGuardaparques they placed containment and dispersant barriers to limit possible negative impacts to the environment.”
In January, Guillermo Lasso's government formalized the creation of a new marine reserve around the Galapagos, whose rich biodiversity inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, to expand the protected area by 60,000 square kilometers and protect endangered migratory species.
Extending the reserve was the first step in a plan agreed by Ecuador with its nearby neighbors Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama, at the United Nations Summit on Climate Change in Glasgow last year, to create a common underwater corridor, through which species threatened by climate change and industrial fishing can migrate.
The existing Galapagos reserve, one of the most important in the world, currently covers 138,000 square kilometers, and the new conservation area will extend protection to about 198,000 square kilometers.
“Today we are declaring an area of 60,000 square kilometers a Marine Reserve, which is equivalent to an area three times the size of Belize,” Lasso said in January after signing the decree creating the new reserve aboard the Sierra Negra ship anchored in Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz Island.
“Contrary to what many would think, preserving marine life is friendly to the planet, but it is also cost-effective,” he added.
Lasso said during the United Nations summit that he hoped that the plan to create a new reserve would obtain financing through a conservation debt exchange. However, the president did not reveal on Friday any details of the mechanisms he will use to obtain resources to finance the new area.
Environmentalists say the new reserve would help protect at least five seriously endangered species, including species of sharks and turtles, that migrate between the Galapagos and Cocos Island in Costa Rica.
Although it will reduce the space currently authorized for the activity of the important Ecuadorian industrial fishing fleet, it will not prevent the presence of a fleet of about 300 mainly Chinese industrial ships, which every year settle in international waters on the edge of the islands to catch giant squid.
The impact of this fleet on the Galapagos ecosystem has not yet been determined by the South American nation.
The islands were declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1978 due to their large number of terrestrial and marine flora and fauna.
With information from AFP
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