EUROWA

Recently Belgian authorities approached Sea Alarm with the offer to help to house the EUROWA equipment stockpile. That equipment has now been moved to a warehouse in Ostend.

In March of 2018, PRO Bird presented a EUROWA Basic training session to two German partner organisations, continuing EUROWA’s work of improving response to oiled wildlife in Europe.

Within hours of the of the chemical tanker Bow Jubail incident in Rotterdam Harbour in the Netherlands, hundreds of mute swans moulting in the harbour area were oiled.

EUROWA partners Wildlife Rescue Centre Ostend (WRCO)/ Belgium and PRO Bird e.V. / Germany delivered a four-day ADVANCED Oiled Wildlife Responder training course in Foynes, Ireland in October 2018.

At the 2018 conference of the RSPCA Wildlife Officer Team, held in March at Mallydams in East Sussex, England, the eighteen officers in attendance were trained in EUROWA ADVANCED Responder Search and Collection procedures.

On  the weekend of 17/18 November 2018, SON-Respons, the new umbrella organisation for oiled wildlife response preparedness in the Netherlands, facilitated two EUROWA BASIC Responder training courses.

Since 2014, the European standard for first responder oiled wildlife training has been the POSOW Wildlife course for volunteers, which was developed under Sea Alarm’s coordination, as part of the first EU funded POSOW project (2013-2014).

A pilot project to begin integration of wildlife rescue into oil spill response in Arctic Russia included a two-day EUROWA Basic Responder Course, which took place in Russia in August 2017. The course, originally developed under the POSOW project (www.posow.org), and further refined by the EUROWA project, was attended by a mixed group of oil company managers, authoritiy regulators and NGO representatives.

The EUROWA project partners met at RSPCA Mallydams Wood in October 2017 for the first in-person meeting since the end of the EU-funded aspect of the project.

EUROWA is in the process of transitioning from a philosophy developed as part of the EU-funded project (2015-16) into a philosophy carried by members of a formalised network, supported by MoUs.  With this transition, there is a need for the group to continue to regularly meet face-to-face to develop further technical standards, share updates and plan upcoming activities.

Sea Alarm has now developed a one-day Oiled Wildlife Response Managers training course which has been added to the EUROWA suite of courses. The course will be provided in mid-October in Helsinki, to attendees of the Baltic Responder Meeting organized by the HELCOM (Helsinki Commission) Response Expert Working Group on Oiled Wildlife Response (EWG-OWR) and will be made available to other countries and regions outside the Baltic Region upon request.