Four Filipino seafarers have collected $250,000 from the US Department of Justice as a reward for alerting authorities that their ship was illegally dumping oil waste into the Pacific.

The four men wrote to the US Coast Guard (USCG) last year describing how their ship, the 25,000-dwt bulker Katerina (built 1985), had violated US environmental laws.

US authorities learned that the ship had devised an elbow pipe to bypass the oily-water separator and discharge oily waste directly into the ocean.

Engineers from the ship also devised another pipe to discharge the sludge that had accumulated in the sludge tanks directly into the ocean, which they euphemistically labeled “the magic pipe”.

Tripped off by the sailors, the USCG searched the ship last September and found a pipe used to bypass the ship’s oily-water separator and the “magic-pipe”.

The US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles has subsequently procured guilty pleas from the ship’s captain, the chief engineer and his aide, and fined the ship’s owner $1m.

The US embassy in Manila said the seamen were not aware of any reward and acted “out of honesty and a higher sense of civic duty”

It also noted they did it at great personal risk and said, “it will be very difficult for them to ever be rehired as seafarers.”

By Dale Wainwright in Singapore