'We have to get better at this' - Marine scientist calls for better monitoring of water after North Sea collision
Plus: Tees Valley Combined Authority paid Teesside Airport £12.7m last year
It’s the 40th edition of The Teesside Lead. A great number for fans of Roman numerals (and easily identified by fans of the Superbowl or Wrestlemania).
I was sat in the BBC’s Newcastle newsroom on Monday when news of a collision in the North Sea came in. Anybody who has even a passing interest in Teesside would no doubt have been concerned about the possible ecological impact, given the mass-mortality events which saw thousands of dead crustaceans wash up in 2021.
We still don’t know the cause of those events, and we probably won’t ever find out. We don’t even know if the event(s) are still ongoing. That’s why I spoke to a marine biologist from the University of Hull this week to find out more about the latest event on his front doorstep.
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Thanks as always for reading!
Leigh
A marine biologist has told The Teesside Lead that systems for gathering and sharing data on pollution at sea need to be improved, following last week’s collision in the North Sea between a tanker and a cargo ship, as well as saying there were “parallels” with the 2021 incidents which saw thousands of crustaceans wash up on the Tees coastline.
Professor Rodney Forster, who leads the Hull Marine Laboratory at the University of Hull, is an expert marine biologist who studies the coasts of Yorkshire and the North East.
He told The Teesside Lead how 2021’s mass-mortality events off the Teesside coast helped create networks between academics and fishers along the coast to enable them to respond quickly to environmental events.
Discussing this week’s collision, he said: “For that part of the world and the Tees, if anything does happen, then we do actually know about it very, very quickly, and we can do something.
“Last September, there was another indication there was maybe something happening in the Tees.
“One of the crab collectors noticed a lot of dead crabs again with some twitching behaviour that was noticed in 2021. So I was able to get up there the next day and go out with one of the fishermen and grab a lot of water samples and do oxygen measurements and so on.”
However, he laments the ad hoc nature of this sort of responsive monitoring. “It's reliant on people like myself being able to grab whatever equipment we have and jump in a car and go and do something. But I think we it's important that we have that ability to do that.”
The government response to this week’s collision has been lead by the Department of Transport, with environmental issues addressed by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency supported by the East of England Environmental Group.
In the House of Lords this week, government minister Lord Hendy said the environmental impact of the collision was “mercifully small”, and that impact on marine and bird life “does not appear to be significant.”
Prof Forster, who visited the site of the collision on Wednesday, says weather conditions this week were “the big mitigating factor”, with strong northerly winds and choppy seas dispersing smoke and contaminants quickly. “The wind and waves have done their jobs for us,” he says.
“They just saved the day by mixing that material in the wider area of the North Sea. And it's probably far enough offshore that relatively little material actually made its way into the really sensitive sites inside the Humber Estuary.”
However, he was critical of the government’s transparency when it came to what data they were gathering, as well as the ability of academics to access it.
“Things would be a lot better if there was more openness as to what information's being collected,” he told The Teesside Lead.
He says the government needs to be on the front foot with providing environmental data after Monday’s collision in order to “put people’s minds to rest.”
“If there’s no information forthcoming,” he says, “in that vacuum - as we saw with the Tees incident - then people speculate and stories and rumours fly around and there’s a a lot of people who make something out of nothing.”
He’s currently trying to access data from a ship which travels from Norway to the Humber estuary each Monday with scientific equipment on board to see a long term picture of the water quality in the area around the collision. However, he thinks the level of contaminants detectable will be in the “parts per billion” range.
It’s the latest event to strike Britain’s east coast. Discussing the fact that plankton species are migrating northwards in the North Sea, Prof Forster says “we have got to get better at doing this.
“We’ve got all kinds of changes happening anyway with climate change on the North East coast. The ecosystems have tremendous stress as it is.”
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Tees Valley Combined Authority paid £12.7m to Teesside Airport last year
If you’ve ever had the pleasure of combing through TVCA’s expenditure reports, you’ll know what a tedious - and difficult - job it can be.
Local authorities are bound by law to publish a list of all expenditure over £500. The way TVCA has historically done this is by printing a spreadsheet, scanning the printouts, and then publishing the pdf of the scanned printout. The effect of this is that it’s impossible to sort or search through the hundreds of payments recorded.
Miraculously, the latest report - for Q4 2024 - is a pdf of a spreadsheet. Not sortable, but at least searchable.
Having looked through one quarter, I couldn’t resist the temptation to look at the bigger picture.
In total, throughout 2024, TVCA gave £12,741,644.58 to Teesside Airport.
The total is made up of 68 transactions, the largest of which was a £2.7m payment listed as a “grant”. Second and third highest were similarly listed for £2.4m.
The majority of transactions are for less than £1,500 and listed as “Utilities” or “Human resources”. Not unreasonable given TVCA is one of the airport’s tenants.
However, one payment which is unlike the others was a £1.20 transfer from TVCA to the airport for “Travel and subsistence” paid in May 2024. There are no other similar expense claims paid to the airport.
Is this an error in how it’s been listed? Or an error in paying it out? What does it mean for the validity of any other expense claims on the expenditure report, or any other expenditure for that matter?
All I know for certain is Greggs raised the price of a sausage roll to £1.25 in July last year.