Outboard motors 'worse than oil spill'

Outboard engines are doing far more environmental damage than the oil spill from the container ship Pacific Adventurer, says retired Queensland academic and marine industry researcher Gary Fooks.

Mr Fooks said the Hong Kong-flagged ship that lost 31 containers after being battered in rough seas caused by Cyclone Hamish in March, dumped 250 tonnes of oil around Moreton Bay.

But weekend boaties using old technology two-stroke engines on their outboards dumped more than 3000 tonnes of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the form of fuel and oil each year into South-East Queensland waterways, he said.

Mr Fooks, an adviser to government and industry, said the Pacific Adventurer disaster made headlines for two weeks and 2500 people worked for weeks cleaning up the environmental catastrophe.

“But the government’s own data shows that weekend boaties cause 15 times as much damage every year as the Pacific Adventurer and nothing is being done to stop that,” he said.

He said Australia could “easily” regulate outboard emissions just as it had done with cars 20 years ago but they had “fallen between the cracks” in government departments.
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