Early on the morning of August 10th, 1993, the residents of Tampa Bay awoke to thick bellowing smoke coming from the water near the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over the bay. A sea collision of two ships bearing a half-million gallons of various petroleum products had caught fire and were leaking their cargo into the pristine waters of Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

Just 10 months previously, nearly 100 local residents had trained under the supervision of the Pinellas Seabird Rehabilitation Center (now known as Save Our Seabirds, S.O.S.) for just such an event.

In the following three months nearly 3,000 volunteers from around the world labored under the direction of P.S.R.C. in a miraculous effort then ended up returning an astonishing 85% of the effected wildlife to their native habitat with every expectation that they would live out their normal, healthy lives.

The following pages are a photographic chronicle of the effort and provide a good guide for what is required to duplicate this effort under such circumstances.

(Save Our Seabirds shares this knowledge through training and materials available directly from S.O.S. For details, click here: Oil Spill Response Training)