Cleaning up after the oil spill: Unsung heroes in Singapore toil daily for over two months

When the tide comes in at East Park, the workers form a human chain to load the boat with bags of oil-stained sand, which brings it back to a staging area. - Photo: ST

SINGAPORE: Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for the past two months. This is how hard Ramdzan Salim and hundreds of others have worked to wash, scrub and scoop the oil from Singapore’s waters and beaches after the Republic’s worst oil spill in a decade.

Ramdzan, a site supervisor with salvage company Resolve Marine, got up at dawn every day to lead his team in cleaning fish farm sea cages between Lazarus and St John’s Islands, as well as on Kusu Island.