The Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority has once again demonstrated that it is capable of preventing oil spills and mitigating the spread of an oil spill during any unfortunate incident within the port environment.
Over the course the week, the Port Authority participated in the ongoing National Oil Spill Equipment Inventory Exercise, where the Environmental Protection Agency and their Norwegian technical partners are assessing capabilities and preparedness of on-shore and off-shore facilities and resources in-country to tackle oil spills.
Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency and their partners from Norway expressed satisfaction at the Authority’s human and technical resources available to fight oil spills.
Larry Koteo, Deputy Director, Environmental Protection Agency said, “annually, we have been having some national exercises at the Tier one and Tier 2 levels with GPHA for some time now.
We are very much impressed about the capabilities that they do have and then getting some additional information from them that they are getting some more of these capabilities in terms of the response equipment. We find that very impressive and it is an assert for the country.
EPA is happy about it because once there is any oil spill anywhere within our marine waters we can fall on GPHA to support.”
Helge Andersen, Special Advisor, Environment Emergency Response, Norwegian Coastal Administration intimated that his outfit is happy to see the seriousness attached to environmental threats in Ghana’s maritime setup.
“If you see all these ships around here anything can happen. They can go grounding, they can collide and then spill oil in the sea. It’s important to have equipment available within short time to try to get the oil off the water before it hits the shore line, harms wild life or pollutes the beaches and all these kind of things. So to have equipment available close to harbour like this is very important.”
According to GPHA, the organisation will continue to upgrade its capacities in order to remain a reliable point of call for Ghana so far as oil spill response is concerned.
Capt. Daniel Quartey is the Deputy Harbour Master and on-scene commander at GPHA.
He explained that the Authority conducts these inspections in-house regularly and conduct necessary drills quarterly to ensure they stay on-top of the job at all times.
“Because of the hard work we put in and the effort of the management seeing the wisdom behind all these things, giving us the resources, the backup, the confirmations and all that. We were able to prove to them that it is not just having the equipment but we have the men as well,” he added.
