Back pain, ceaseless tides, defaced beaches: Front-liners on East Coast oil spill cleanup (2024)

SINGAPORE – A week after the blackened beaches, smothered waters and animal casualties caused by a ruptured oil tank had been measured and tackled at speed, the sea breeze still carried the caustic smell of diesel.

It would take 10 days and the work of some 700 front-liners before the authorities declared the sand at affected beaches mostly clean on June 24, after the 400-tonne oil spill of June 14.

In scale and public sentiment, this “housekeeping” operation appeared more than just perfunctory.

The beach closures spawned grief, spirited responses to calls for volunteers and keen civilian surveyors who are logging their field notes daily for close to 1,000 watchful members in group chats.

Also unusual: Between the ranks of maritime personnel and migrant workers mobilised for the cleanup were local students roped in as temporary hires.

On visits to East Coast Park on June 19 and 20, The Straits Times spoke to 11 local students kitted out in the same cap, gloves and rubber boots as the professionals they stood ankle-deep in sludge with.

They would have accounted for at least a tenth of the roughly 100 workers deployed in the East Coast Park cleanup on those days.

Undergraduate Edward Low, 24, had come alone. With a group of around 14 others, he shovelled clods of black sand into trash bags and heaped them onto tarpaulin sheets – some 15 steps from the sea.

“I just wanted to clean up the beach and this (job) was an opportunity to do so,” he said. “I don’t come to the beach often, but it’s sad about the oil spill spoiling the environment.”

On June 20, the southern islands and much of East Coast Park, where more than 10km of the shoreline had been taped off for cleanup works, were pronounced largely clear.

But just a day before, those working the grim shores had only a dim notion of progress.

“Once you scoop the first layer, more oil appears underneath. It’s discouraging because every time you think it’s over, it’s not,” said Mr Edwin Wang, a 26-year-old university student.

“The tide just keeps washing more oil up.”

He was nearing the end of his battle with the currents, in an 8am to sundown shift.

“It’s hard for me because I’m too unfit,” he said. “There’s back pain from the bending, from the shovelling, too.”

The workers had devised belts made of knotted trash bags, which they kept around their waist for easy reach.

As they worked, they bent and straightened in an uneven rhythm, periodically whipping off damp caps to reveal heads of matted hair.

The trouble lay in sifting the debris from the sand, said soon-to-be national serviceman Syafeeq Ramlee, referring to flotsam which tends to worsen in June and July as the south-west monsoon sweeps more rubbish ­ashore.

“The oil bags are heavy, about 4kg, and we have to keep transferring,” the 22-year-old added.

“In half a day, three of us managed to fill up only half the cloth (tarpaulin).”

But it is light work compared with what full-timers do, said the students.

“Honestly speaking, we get to appreciate what the foreign workers are experiencing,” student Derius Khoo, 25, said.

“They don’t get as many breaks as us. When we’re tired, we can just take a break.”

Speaking to ST on June 20, Mr Dino Azahar, 58, a driver for a cleaning contractor, and Mr Sulaiman Ali, a supervisor, said they had worked two hours overtime each day since the spill hit.

A typical shift begins at 5.30am and ends around 6pm.

“We work the sea, so anything can happen. We have to face that. Hard, whatever it is, or even tired, we still have to do it – it’s part of the job,” said Mr Azahar.

For Mr Syafeeq, there was gratification to be found in the difficulty. “It feels nice to contribute to society. There are so many people wearing this uniform, I don’t feel alone,” he said.

The numbers seem to back his sentiment. Within a day of the spill reaching beaches, the National Parks Boards’ (NParks) call for volunteers had been answered by over 1,500 people.

So far, at least 160 volunteers have been mobilised to patrol the shorelines of West Coast Park and East Coast Park to watch for encroaching oil, advise others to keep away from the water, and pick litter.

Volunteers, like sea community group Marine Stewards, and marine scientists also conducted a biodiversity survey in the southern waters coordinated by NParks a day after the spill hit the beaches.

Still, official figures omit the passing Samaritans handing out water and sweet drinks to workers, some temporary workers and the supersized chat groups devoted to providing first-hand updates on the cleanup.

Marine Stewards were inundated with requests to volunteer within minutes of issuing a call, said founder Sue Ye.

Ms Joanne Liew was one of two unrecorded “volunteers” ST saw distributing dozens of packet drinks to visibly fatigued workers, paid for out of her own pocket.

The 33-year-old, who had the day off work, said: “I felt sad I couldn’t do anything about the oil spill. When I noticed a lot of workers cleaning up, I thought to make someone’s day.”

But if the apparent burst of public interest in protecting Singapore’s coastlines is “overwhelming” – as Minister Desmond Lee put it – it is not unprecedented.

Under the baton of groups like Singapore Beach Warriors and East Coast Beach Plan, small groups of volunteers have been routinely and systematically picking trash on local beaches since 2019.

East Coast Beach Plan began in 2020 as a direct response to the sight of a beach under siege by litter and debris, said co-lead Yasser Amin.

The decentralised group has organised some 200 trash-picking expeditions at East Coast Park since.

“My friend Samantha Thian started the Telegram group chat to get her friends to clean with her, but then it spun into this massive thing,” Mr Amin said of the group’s 2,800 members.

He puts the spate of interest in the oil spill cleanup operation down to an instinctive objection to a defaced beach.

“People care. When you go to the beach, you expect a beautiful scene. If you see the trash in person, the volume, it’s jarring, and it sticks to people. You realise, this is all us,” he said.

Beaches hidden under sheets of rubbish are precisely the consequence of human action on the environment, added Mr Amin, who now heads volunteer cleanup sessions full-time at Stridys, a firm that organises cleanups.

Though sign-ups for East Coast Beach Plan cleaning trips tapered off post-pandemic, Singapore Beach Warriors still hosts regular trash-picking sessions. The group has some 3,000 followers on its main platform on Facebook.

Asked if the recent show of public-spiritedness complicated findings of a 2023 NVPC study that said young people were more inclined to fundraise online than volunteer time and labour, executive director of the Lien Centre for Social Innovation Steve Loh said it did not.

“Such studies do well to accurately capture sentiment and inclinations in ordinary everyday life but extraordinary events often inspire extraordinary responses,” he said.

The oil spill can be analogised to the pandemic, he added, inspiring “latent heroes” to step up.

• With additional reporting by Elise Wong