For many decades, the world’s governments and militaries have been using the oceans as a dumping ground for old munitions and chemical weapons.
Canadian Terrence Long has long campaigned to get the world to be aware of the issue and try to clean these toxic and dangerous materials from the ocean.
He is chairman of the International Dialogues on Underwater Munitions and global leader on Sea-dumped Chemical Weapons.
Listen It’s a case of out of sight, out of mind.
For most of the twentieth century the world’s oceans have been a too convenient place to quickly and cheaply dispose of old military high explosive shells and chemical weapons.
These include a huge variety of chemical weapons and containers of poisons, to explosive shells containing picric acid, lead compound, mercury and more, in addition to TNT.
Terrence Long says he has evidence that toxic materials leaking from these old munitions is affecting marine life which show evidence of cancers, tumours and other abnormalities around dump sites.
He says ultimately the munitions cause economic harm to the fishing industry, with further potential for major damage to oil exploration from an explosion and oil spill, and any other deep sea activities.
In many cases the dump sites are known, but in just as many cases, they are not. Mr Long says there are some 3,000 known sites off the east coast of Canada, but suspects there are at least that many undocumented sites.
He cites one known dump off Cape Breton where he says there are 80-thousand tons of convential munitions on the sea floor.
His International Dialogues on Underwater Munitions have already resulted in some international efforts create regulations to deal with dumping and already dumped munitions. Other efforts too have begun to identify dump areas and with monitoring determine and develop data on chemical releases into the ocean water.
Recently Mr Long collaborated with a European documentary film crew on the issue of munitions dumped at sea which was broadcast in Europe.
The English version , called Deadly Depths, will be aired in Canada on TVO on March 17th.
The 5th international conference to discuss the issue will be held in the eastern province of Nova Scotia on the 28-29 May.
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