Cleanup on Samet gets poor rating from judge

Before his arrival last Wednesday morning, Dag had been monitoring news reports for three days via various channels, including social media, for updates on the beach-cleaning mission while no one knew how the accident happened. Seeing a lot of rumours spreading via social media, Dag asked his boss for three days leave and travelled to Koh Samet. He said he was inspired to do this by a documentary about an oil spill recovery effort in another country and he wanted to join the mission.

First thing he did when he got on Samet was to ride a rented motorcycle around the island to witness what was really happening with his own eyes.

“I found that most of beaches and seawater surrounding the island are not like the media reports. The beaches and seawater are clean and not tainted with slick. Visitors were still enjoy swimming in the sea and not panicking over the oil problem,” he said.

Some street vendors told him that the atmosphere on the island was not so chaotic.

Ao Phrao was his last stop on a two-hour motorbike trip around the island and he was very surprised the moment he arrived at the scene of the crisis.

“When I arrived at Ao Phrao I could smell the oil. It was unbelievable,” he said.

He immediately parked his motorcycle and rushed to the beach to join the thousands of workers cleaning the beach.

“They asked me which group I came with and I told them that I had no group. I had just come here by myself,” he said.

The workers just gave him a white bio-protection suit, a pair of plastic boots and gloves, without teaching him how to use the suit and prevent him from being affected by the crude oil.

“The only thing that they gave me was a manual in English. I’ve just wondered how other volunteers or workers who cannot read English would understand the manual,” he said.

Dag spent several hours with other volunteers and thousands of soldiers cleaning up the beach. They used buckets and shovels to remove the thick black oil.

“You can’t stay there on the tainted beach for more than two hours – we could not breathe and be patient with the strong smell of the crude oil,” he said.

“No one told us how long we could stay on the beach.”

While working as a volunteer on the beach, he saw some PTTGC staff wasting their time walking around on the street behind and sitting inside the small pavilion in a nearby resort.

“Soldiers had to work hard but PTTGC’s staff were just walking around,” he said.

Moreover, he did not believe the clean-up was well organised, as there was no key commander to tell volunteers what to do and what kind of work volunteers needed to do.

At the end of the day, after finishing his volunteer work to clean the beach, he took his motorcycle and rode to another beach to take a break before coming back to meet up with other workers again

“There was still a fresh breeze at the other beach, and it was like the white sand on Sai Kaew beach. And they still have nice fruit here on this island,” he said.