Monday February 26, 2007

Restoring the SEABED

A government-directed volunteer project in the Phi Phi islands is attempting to rehabilitate tsunami- damaged coral reefs, but their work is being undermined by careless and unchecked tourist activity

An artificial reef assembled by Andrew and his team. Artificial reefs have been created as alternative scuba diving sites to reduce pressure on the area's coral reefs

Story and photos by DR NALINEE THONGTHAM : Being a tsunami survivor has given Andrew Hewett a new mission in life. Following the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which devastated the Phi Phi islands, killing hundreds of locals and tourists, Andrew launched a clean-up operation that lasted for months. Now, he is devoting his time to restoring the area's damaged coral reefs.

Hewett barely escaped with his life that morning after Christmas two years ago. A long-time resident of Phi Phi Don, the biggest of the group of islands where he was a scuba diving instructor before starting an ecotourism business six years ago, Hewett was in his shop with his wife, Mayuree, and their two children when they heard people shouting and screaming.

The coral is grown in nurseries suspended in the water until it is big enough to be replanted in areas damaged by the tsunami.

"We knew something was going on but didn't know what," he recalled. "We didn't know it was a wave but the children, who were eight and four at the time, were with us so we didn't want to stick around to find out. The tsunami hit just 20 seconds after we got to higher ground.

"We were very lucky because usually our children were in different places, riding their bicycles around the island or playing with their friends in the neighbourhood, but at that time we were all together," he said.

"We lost our house and we lost one of our two shops. Fortunately, the structure of the main shop survived, but we lost everything in it."

Instead of dwelling on his losses, Hewett became one of the driving forces behind the Herculean task of cleaning up the island. "I felt a sense of responsibility for being alive," he explained.

In February 2005 he set up a volunteer clean-up group called the Phi Phi Dive Camp. For its first six months, the camp had an average staff of around 60 volunteers, both Thais and foreigners. The volunteers were divided between divers, snorkellers, beach clean-up crews, boat crews and other support teams. The camp also employed 25 local Thai residents.

The group collected about 300 tonnes of rubbish from the sea around Phi Phi Don. "The tsunami washed everything out into the ocean," said Hewett.

"It would have been an environmental catastrophe, so we cleaned all the beaches on the island."

The debris retrieved from the water ranged from trees, galvanised iron and other construction materials to bicycles, cabinets, household appliances and personal effects including passports and wallets, which the team turned over to the relevant embassies.

Tsunami survivor Andrew Hewett has been helping marine biologists restore damaged coral reefs at Phi Phi Lae island.

The tsunami prompted massive relief efforts in Thailand not only for survivors but also for coral formations. Four days after the tsunami struck, an unprecedented number of researchers from various government agencies and educational institutes joined up with more than 120 volunteer divers in a cooperative effort to assess the impact of the giant wave on marine resources in southern Thailand.

Some coral reefs around the Phi Phi islands were found to be among the worst hit, along with those in the Similan islands, Surin and parts of Ranong province. Coral formations in Satun, Phuket, Krabi and Trang escaped almost unscathed.

The coral the volunteer divers tried to save had been rolled or broken by the tsunami, had collapsed after sands had moved or had been smothered by sediment or debris.

Now, more than two years later, all the volunteers except one have gone back to their lives: Andrew Hewett has continued to tirelessly help marine biologists from the Phuket Marine Biological Centre (PMBC), part of the Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR), in their effort to rehabilitate the damaged reefs at Phi Phi Lae.

A coral nursery is fixed into place in the water.

A coral reef at Phi Phi Lae that was destroyed by the 2004 tsunami.

Students from the University of Missouri help prepare coral fragments for planting in nurseries.

Earlier, the DMCR had called a meeting of diving and tour operators on Phi Phi to explain the importance of creating artificial reefs to reduce the pressure of tourism on natural coral formations. Hewett responded by offering his help and that of his staff in placing the concrete blocks that the alternative dive sites would be constructed of on the seabed at Phi Phi Lae.

As part of the coral rehabilitation project, PMBC researchers took tiny fragments of coral from the sea and grew them in nurseries suspended in water until they were big enough to be transplanted to tsunami-affected areas.

Hewett helped plant the coral fragments in the nurseries and volunteered to oversee the operation and transplant the coral later. Last October, he mobilised fellow divers, who helped him and his team plant 1,100 coral specimens on tsunami-damaged reefs around Phi Phi Lae. Hewett has since been monitoring the reefs, collecting data on the health, growth and survival of the replanted coral on behalf of PMBC researchers, as well as cleaning and maintaining the coral nurseries to control the growth of algae and barnacles. He recently raised the possibility with the PMBC of setting up more floating nurseries.

Why is Hewett devoting so much time to the restoration of coral reefs?

"It fascinates me," he said. "It's a beautiful environment down there, so I enjoy working on this type of project. Partly it has to do with my own business, which involves diving and snorkelling, but then so does my life; I do my job because I enjoy diving and snorkelling. I have the choice to have either a direct impact on the reefs or to do something that reduces that impact. And I chose the latter: Trying to do things that will help the reefs.

"Tourists destroy coral reefs because they are not informed about their importance as nursery grounds for all kinds of marine life," Hewett continued. "And that's what our business does. It's not a question of money first, it's a question of sustainable tourism first.

"In one sense that hurts my business, because we don't do boatloads of people unless it's a group of university students and they are coming specifically to learn how to protect the reefs. Normally, my tours comprise just six people with a guide to explain the impact of tourism on the reefs and how to protect them."

Since the tsunami, Hewett has lost a lot of business, which is why he welcomes the PMBCs coral rehabilitation project. "I haven't seen much of a change in people's understanding of coral reefs since the tsunami," he said. "The awareness is very small, and hopefully projects like this can help people understand why reefs are important.

"It's too much work to try to grow new coral everywhere, but hopefully we can use the project to teach people about how to protect coral reefs and attitudes will change so that reefs have a chance for survival."

While he sees the project as educational, Hewett does not discount its potential to create revenue for tour operators.

"For the first time in two years, we actually made money out of the project for which we have been volunteering," he said. "We just had 18 students from the University of Missouri who ... at the end of their trip said the thing they enjoyed most was the thought that they were doing something to help by planting coral in the nurseries.

"Next year the university can assemble a new group to come and visit the site and they will be able to see the progress of what the students did the year before, so its like an ongoing project.

"Ideally, it would be nice if we could get Thai schools involved. The thing that we are concerned about most is the way people who live in coastal areas treat their ocean. A lot of them tend to use it as a place for rubbish. There's not enough understanding of how easy it is to damage the reefs and the marine life. If we can attract students to come and see coral and learn what they are, then I think it's a good start."

Apart from short visits to his native England, Hewett has been a resident of Phi Phi Don for most of the past 12 years. What frustrates him the most, he said, is the lack of effort by agencies that are supposed to protect natural resources. The Phi Phi islands, as part of the Had Nopparat Thara Marine National Park, have had national park status since 1983, but there is no enforcement of laws that prohibit boats from anchoring on coral reefs.

"Phi Phi is so popular that on a given day we get maybe 60 boats coming from Phuket and elsewhere, not counting the boats already on the island, and everyone throws their anchors into the sea," said Hewett. "We've filmed the damage that it does, but although there are park wardens to collect fees from each person who steps onto the beach, there are no patrol boats to check on other activities that are going on. Boats anchor wherever they want and people can stand on reefs wherever they want or fish wherever they want. There's no control whatsoever.

"I don't think the coral reefs will survive until [national park law] enforcement begins, and we will probably see the destruction of a number of reefs. Then those boats will move on to other healthy reefs and destroy those, too."

Nalinee Thongtham, PhD, is a marine biologist with the Phuket Marine Biological Centre and head of the coral rehabilitation project at Phi Phi Lae.