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Korea's Oil Spill Still Spreading
Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2007 By JENNIFER VEALE / SEOUL
For Choi Yeyong, an environmentalist with Friends of the Earth Korea, it
was the worst kind of déjà vu. "When I reached the tanker and saw the
holes, it felt like the spill 12 years ago," recalls Choi, who says he
was nearly brought to tears when he surveyed South Korea's worst-ever
oil spill last Saturday on the country's west coast. In 1995, the Korean
tanker Sea Prince ran aground during a typhoon, spilling 5,000 tons of
oil on the southern coast. The slick caused an estimated $100 million in
damage and took five months to clean up. "But this time," says Choi, "[the
spill] is twice as large."
The latest spill occurred on the morning of Dec. 7, when a barge owned
by Samsung Heavy Industries smashed into the Hong Kong-registered
supertanker Hebei Spirit about five miles (8km) off the coast and some
93 miles (150km) southwest of the capital Seoul, tearing holes in its
hull. The anchored tanker was carrying about 230,000 tons of crude oil,
of which an estimated 10,840 tons gushed into the sea between Korea and
China before the leak was finally halted on Sunday morning.
The clean-up effort, which began in earnest Sunday, the day after the
oil slick started to wash ashore, has involved 150 ships as well as
thousands of police, soldiers, fishermen and volunteers. The front pages
of Korea's major newspapers have been covered with pictures of rescue
workers and disconsolate local residents scooping up viscous, oil-saturated
water from the area's beaches. A paltry 698 tons of oil has been
collected so far, according to the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and
Fisheries.
Five days into the disaster, the oil slick is still spreading. As of
Tuesday, the spill had contaminated an estimated 24 miles (38km) of
coastline, damaging several thousand hectares of aquatic farmland and a
handful of scenic beaches. And as the damage spreads, so does the blame:
Korean media and environmentalists now argue that the disaster could
have been mitigated had the government responded more effectively.
"They weren't prepared enough to control the spread," Gi Tgan Hyuk, a
spokesman for the Korea Federation For Environment Movement, told TIME.
The group says the government should have put an oil fence around the
tanker immediately to control the slick while rescue teams waited for
heavy seas to settle down in order to plug the remaining holes in the
tanker's portside, a job that was completed only some 48 hours after the
accident. While the government says it did place barriers around the
tanker, environmental groups charge that the vessel wasn't completely
encircled, allowing oil to seep out.
Some Korean media outlets also accuse the government of underestimating
the environmental impact of the collision from the outset. Officials on
Friday were initially optimistic that the accident would prove to less
serious than the 1995 spill, because the collision was further out to
sea and the cold weather would prevent it from reaching the shoreline
quickly. But heavy winds and strong tides carried the oil to the
coastline in less than twelve hours.
In the wake of the 1995 accident, environmentalists say, the Korean
government talked about the need to clamp down on single-hulled tankers
like the Sea Prince and insist that only safer double-bottomed or double-hulled
ships carry oil in its waters. (Single-hulled tankers are scheduled to
be phased out worldwide by 2010 under an international maritime treaty.)
The Hebei Spirit, which was carrying oil from the United Arab Emirates
to the Hyundai Oil Bank at Daeson, has a single hull. Without any
legislation against such vessels, "the terrible thing is this kind of
accident can happen again," says Choi. Korea's Chosun Ilbo newspaper
also reported on Tuesday that the Hebei Spirit was notified about the
loose barge, but allegedly said it could not change its course at that
time. The government is now investigating the cause of the accident.
While Seoul has so far declined to put a price tag on the disaster, the
Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries has declared the area a
disaster zone, enabling emergency funds, resources and personnel to be
mobilized more quickly. But with heavy winds and strong tides hampering
cleanup efforts the damage — and the costs — are expected to grow. The
Ministry estimates it will take about two months to clean up the damage.
How long the political fallout takes to settle is anyone's guess.
South Korea Cleans Up
Big Oil Spill
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 9 — Thousands of fishermen, soldiers and
volunteers struggled on Sunday to clean up an oil spill that has caused
an environmental disaster in South Korea. It has blackened once scenic
beaches, coated birds and oysters in sludge and driven away tourists
with its stomach-churning stench.
But the 7,000 people mobilized were too few to clean up the oil slick,
which has been washing up since Saturday along a 12-mile-long shoreline
of the nation’s west coast. Strong tides, which dragged the sludge
before pushing it ashore again, hampered the cleanup operations by
villagers, who complained of headaches and nausea from the stench.
The oil spill occurred Friday when the steel wire linking a tugboat to a
barge carrying a crane snapped in stormy seas. The barge lurched toward
the Hebei Spirit, a Hong Kong-registered oil tanker, which was at
anchor, and punched three holes into its hull.
The spill came a week after the South Korean port town of Yosu won the
right to be the host in 2012 for an international event called Expo.
Bidding for the event, South Korea championed the theme of “the living
ocean and coast,” a slogan it hoped would bolster environmental
awareness in Asia.
The size of the oil spill was about one-fourth that of the 260,000
barrels, or 11 million gallons, leaked into Prince William Sound off
Alaska from the Exxon Valdez in 1989. It was twice as big as a spill off
South Korea in 1995 that cost $101 million in damages to fishermen and
required a cleanup operation that took months.
By Sunday, it became clear to local residents that they were battling an
environmental disaster. The tidal flats near Taean County, about 95
miles southwest of Seoul, are home to rich wildlife, oysters and fish
farms, and a national park. Each year, millions of tourists flock there
to bathe in the summer or watch migrating birds stop to feed in the
muddy flats teeming with clams. About 64,000 people live in Taean.
“Everyone is out there fighting — there is so much oil we have to use
buckets to scoop it up,” Moon Hong-chol, a resident in the village of
Wonbuk in Taean, said by telephone. “The dark brown slime is all over
our oyster and abalone and clam beds. Tourists are canceling resort
reservations. I think we are finished.”
The provincial government appealed to people to donate used clothes for
soldiers who were collecting the sludge in the freezing cold.
The central government declared a state of disaster, which makes it
easier for regional governments to mobilize personnel and equipment.
Neither ship involved in the spill was in danger of sinking, and there
were no casualties. But the tanker spilled an estimated 10,500 tons, or
2.8 million gallons, of crude oil before the last of the three holes was
plugged Sunday.
“The worst is over in that there is no more spill,” said Ryu Young, a
coast guard official in Taean. “We are doing our best to contain as much
of the slick as possible before it reaches the shore.”
The 147,000-ton Hebei Spirit was five miles off the coast at the time of
the collision, waiting to unload its 1.8 million barrels of crude oil at
a nearby port.
The barge belonged to Samsung Heavy Industries, a shipbuilder affiliated
with the Samsung conglomerate. The police were questioning officials of
the company, as well as the crews of the barge and the tanker, the
Yonhap news agency reported.
Kang Moo-hyun, minister of maritime affairs and fisheries, said Sunday
that it would take at least two months to complete the cleanup.
“The oil stuck to the shore or sank to the sea bottom, causing serious
damage to the maritime biology and ecosystem in the region,” Mr. Kang
said. “Even if some maritime organisms survive, they won’t be marketable
for quite a while.”
Coast guard vessels hurried to establish floating oil fences, but high
waves left them useless. Offshore, 105 coast guard, navy and private
fishing boats were throwing absorbing cloth and spraying chemicals, as
oil continued to zigzag toward the shore, where people wearing rubber
gloves and masks spread out with mats to absorb oil.
“All day, people have been scrubbing boulders coated with oil and
scooping up sand soaked with oil,” said Lee Hyun-jin, a resident in the
village of Sowon in Taean. “But now they are retreating because the sea
is in high tide again. We feel hopelessly outnumbered.”
Kim Eun-young, in the nearby village of Yiwon, said: “This morning, we
found clumps of oil floating like ugly pan-fried cakes. They retreated
with the tide and now are coming back again.”
“This is getting worse, and we have 260 villagers out there today with
buckets, cans and whatnot, compared with 57 yesterday,” Ms. Kim added.
Fuentes/Fonts
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/EGUA-79ZNE8?OpenDocument
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/SHES-7A9NPC?OpenDocument&query=Hebei%20Spirit
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/Archivo/nota.asp?nota_id=968977
http://ar.news.yahoo.com/s/06122007/59/n-world-968977-derrame-petr-leo-corea-sur.html
http://www2.lavoz.com.ar/07/12/09/secciones/sociedad/nota.asp?nota_id=142357
http://www.radio.uchile.cl/notas.aspx?idNota=42549
http://www.lanacion.com.py/noticias.php?not=174489
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/SHES-79VL46?OpenDocument&RSS20=22-P
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/KKAA-79Z9TN?OpenDocument
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Korea_oil_spill
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0712/S00974.htm
http://www.lloydslist.com/ll/news/viewArticle.htm?articleId=20017486365&src=rss
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/5A6A780E-21BE-4432-8C9F-E10E544AC37A.htm
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1693383,00.html
http://www.physorg.com/news116407357.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/world/asia/10skorea.html About pollution...OPC is
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