I read with interest the hundreds of expert opinion on the cause, clean-up and the salvage.
Really in the end of the day these disasters happen frequently enough to have some precedent and learnings can be had.
First problem is New Zealand has a vast coast line and hundreds of reefs that are significant to shipping and they have been there for a long time. But the authorities did not have a workable plan in place. With that I mean no emergency planning that included training equipment and procedure existed. So for a coast line that has significant hazards and the chance of this happening is realistic no one decided to go down the 'what if' road and put something in place for when this happened.
Secondly it makes the clean up look very amateurish, allowing the media to overstate the hazards and turn 10 dead oil covered birds into hundreds by showing them over and over again. It allows a group like Greenpeace to say see crude oil is bad. It causes Government officials to look under prepared.
We are not good at setting standards and policing them we believe in bottom of the cliff control and running around in circles waiving our hands in the air screaming blaim to each other.
A bit of planning and control will go a long way to minimise these events as you will not be able to eliminate them!
