[imagesource: Wikiphilip at the English Wikipedia]

In April 2007, the cruise ship MS Sea Diamond ran aground near the Greek island of Santorini and sank the next day.

The tragic incident took the lives of a French father and daughter and made international headlines for the difficult and dangerous evacuation of 1,195 passengers.

17 years later the ship is still sitting in the ocean, leaking toxins, chemicals and heavy metals into the ocean all around the world-famous Greek island and its beautiful caldera.

The people of Santorini are still fighting for the removal of the wreck that has become a hot potato between stakeholders as it evolves into a silent environmental time bomb, noted The Greek Reporter.

In a letter sent to Parliament’s Special Standing Committee for Environmental Protection this week, Santorini’s residents are demanding the complete salvage and removal of the MS Sea Diamond from the caldera.

Image: Reddit

There are reasonable fears that the inevitable corrosion of its steel fuel tanks will cause an enormous fuel leak sooner or later, which would lead to catastrophe for the pristine marine environment and devastate the island’s marine ecosystem.

“The shipwreck remains on the seabed and continues to pollute, at a slow but steady rate, it erodes daily and at any time it can cause an incalculable ecological disaster,” the letter said.

Loucas Lignos, a spokesperson for local protest groups, recently informed Greek Reporter that both the ship owner and successive Greek administrations have neglected their duty to address the imminent environmental peril posed by the fully stocked fuel tanks of the ship.

Despite initial efforts to decontaminate the waters and adjacent shoreline in the months following the incident, followed by a failed pumping operation two years later, locals deem the ongoing containment measures inadequate in mitigating the looming threat.

But nobody wants to take responsibility for salvaging the shipwreck:

“What is at stake, in this case, is who will pay for the process; the insurance company does not want to, neither does the ship-owner company and of course everyone is trying to avoid the removal, just as has happened with so many other shipwrecks in the Greek seas,” Lignos told Greek Reporter.

Back in 2014, the Civil Court of First Instance sided with the municipality of Santorini, holding the ship’s owner accountable for the incident and liable to cover the expenses for removing the wreck, regardless of the cost. Additionally, the owner was ordered to pay several million euros in damages to both the local administration of the island and the Greek state.

But the company appealed the decision and the procedure is still pending in the court.

The known pollutants inside the Santorini shipwreck include hundreds of cubic metres of motor fuel and lubricants; hundreds of litres of battery electrolytes; copper cables; anodes containing heavy metals, and other dangerous chemicals — all taking an estimated 400 years to become inert.

Image: Loucas Lignos

While a containment barrier is still in place around the sunken ship, plumes of oil regularly become visible on the sea’s surface whenever there is strong wind:

“I can’t say that we currently have tar or petrol oil on our beaches, or that we can’t swim, but I do notice oily mixtures surfacing from the shipwreck daily. Someday, the tanks will break open and much more fuel will come out from whatever is inside MS Sea Diamond,” Lignos explained to Greek Reporter.

The Santorini man’s despair becomes even greater when he realises that “twenty or thirty years will have passed, they’ll tell us, you know what, the ship is now rusted and the metal won’t survive being lifted up by the cranes.”

“So leave it there and any time that fuel surfaces, we’ll come clean it up,” Lignos lamented.

Keep fighting, Santorini, so that you can keep swimming.

[source:greekreporter]