One man has been working for a decade to clean up ocean oil leaks from WWII warships

Transcript

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

The greatest problem that nobody has heard about - that is the way our next guest describes the cause he's been working on for the last decade. He's director of a conservation nonprofit called Major Projects Foundation. The organization identifies wrecks in the Pacific Ocean that have been there since World War II and are now posing big threats to the environment. Paul Adams joins us now from Newcastle, Australia. Welcome.

PAUL ADAMS: Thanks for having me.

CHANG: Thanks for being with us. Well, before we talk about these wrecks, I just want to touch on how you started this organization. I understand it was inspired by a personal experience you had.

ADAMS: There was a family holiday. Myself and three kids, we went on a family holiday to dive on shipwrecks up in Micronesia. Local divers took us out. Out of the 10 shipwrecks that we dive, four of them were leaking oil. So I actually didn't recognize what it was.

CHANG: These black bubbles.

ADAMS: Yeah, black bubbles just coming out of the coral.

CHANG: Wow.

ADAMS: And when we got to the surface on the first one, I asked our dive guide what it was, and he told me oil. Well, to me, it was beyond comprehension that shipwrecks still held oil.

CHANG: So what made you start thinking, I'm going to start an organization to deal with this problem?

ADAMS: I asked the locals, you know, who's doing something about it, and basically they said nobody's doing anything about it. We have been pleading with various governments - Japanese, American - for the last 30 odd years, and nothing's really been done.

CHANG: Yeah. And at this point, I understand that you've identified something like more than 3,000 of these vessels? Can you just explain, why is it so important that these wrecks be cleaned up? Like, what are the various environmental threats you're looking at?

ADAMS: There's numerous threats with this, Ailsa. It's not just environmental either. I mean, there's social effects. Imagine you're on a nice, pristine beach. You live there. You fish every day. And you wake up in the morning, and it's black. You know, the oil has got into the local mangroves. It's decimated your fish stocks, breeding area. You can't go swimming anymore.

A lot of these countries depend on these wrecks for tourism from people who come diving. I know from the United States, there's - a big contingent of divers go there. Basically, that just disappears overnight. So these are some of the impacts that it can have, and it's quite severe.

CHANG: I just want to understand more clearly what cleaning up these wrecks means. Are we talking about removing them entirely or cleaning them but leaving them where they are?

ADAMS: Look; it's very important to understand that these shipwrecks do have other value. For one, the diving ability for tourists to go down in them, so therefore income for the local communities. They've become artificial reefs for fish and the likes. They're also war graves. Pretty much all the ships we're talking about sunk during World War II, and so they're live gravesites as well. So we need to treat them with respect at the same time.

CHANG: Right. After a decade of this work, where is your foundation now with the cleanup effort? Are you hopeful that your foundation can make a substantial dent in this problem?

ADAMS: I mean, at the moment, we've taken 3,000 wrecks down to basically 60 critical wrecks that we need to look at fairly urgently. And that's very manageable. I think as this unfolds and the extent of the problem really becomes known, we're getting a lot of interest out of governments to see what exactly they can do about it. We're in the same room, and we're discussing, so it's really encouraging, the response that we've got so far.

CHANG: Well, I wish you the best of luck. That was Paul Adams, director of the Major Projects Foundation. Thank you very much.

ADAMS: Yeah. Pleasure. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.