China alleges: ocean cleared of oil 10 days after spill
China alleges: Ocean cleared of oil 10 days after spill
By Lily Kuo, The Los Angeles Times.
Chinese officials said July 26th, that an oil slick in coastal waters has been cleaned up 10 days after a massive explosion sent an estimated 1,500 tons of crude into the Yellow Sea along the northeastern port city of Dalian.
But beaches along Dalian’s long shoreline remain closed indefinitely, with oil covering rocks and pebbles on the sand, and fishing has been banned until the end of the summer. Environmentalists say nearby bays are also polluted.
“This is a victory,” the city’s mayor, Li Wancai, said Monday in an interview with the Dalian Daily News. “The slick has been completely removed, and the oil has not spread to international waters or the Bohai Sea.” Bohai is a northwestern arm of the Yellow Sea, off the coast of northern China.
Li credited thousands of fishermen and residents with cleaning up the spill, which occurred after a pipeline explosion July 16. The cleanup consisted of spraying oil-dispersant chemicals, planting oil-consuming bacteria and scooping up the thickest part of the oil spill into plastic barrels.
There were no casualties in the explosion and ensuing fire, but one firefighter drowned after being swept from a boat by a wave.
Environmentalists say that although the majority of the oil has been removed, damage remains extensive.
Han Xu, a member of Greenpeace, which has been involved in cleanup efforts in Dalian since the explosion, says some bays are still covered with oil. Some aquaculture farms are seeing their crop output drop drastically.
“More devastating are the beaches that are totally covered in oil,” Han said.
The thick, sticky black substance can still be seen in the water by the shoreline, as well as on the beach.
Han said children continued to play on the contaminated beaches, and tourists were still swimming in the water. He said some residents were even seen trying to clean up the oil from the ground with their bare hands.
Greenpeace says the environment will be adversely affected for at least 30 years. Government officials acknowledge that the cleanup campaign is not over. Li said that the focus must move “from the ocean to the land” and that efforts must be made to prevent oil onshore from seeping back into the ocean.
“The problem with cleaning up an oil spill is that it’s everywhere,” Han said.
Officials said the July 16 incident occurred when workers injected desulfurizer into a pipeline, part of the refinement process, and a fireball was ignited. The blaze raged at the harbor for 15 hours, shrouding the city in smoke. The burst pipeline eventually spewed enough oil to cover 140 square miles with about 47,600 gallons of crude.
The workers who injected the chemical were employed by PetroChina, a subsidiary of the state-owned oil and gas producer China National Petroleum Corp. and the owner of the damaged pipeline.
An investigation by the State Administration of Work Safety and the Ministry of Public Security found that company employees had not verified the safety of the strongly oxidizing chemical or used standard injection procedures.
US expert: China oil spill far bigger than stated
By Cara Anna, Associated Press.
China’s worst known oil spill is dozens of times larger than the government has reported, bigger than the famous Exxon Valdez spill two decades ago, and some of the oil was dumped deliberately to avoid further disaster, an American expert said Friday July 30th.
China’s government has said 1,500 tons (461,790 gallons) of oil spilled after a pipeline exploded two weeks ago near the northeastern city of Dalian, sending 100-foot- (30-meter-) high flames raging for hours near one of the country’s key strategic oil reserves. Such public estimates stopped within a few days of the spill.
But Rick Steiner, a former University of Alaska marine conservation specialist, estimated 60,000 tons (18.47 million gallons) to 90,000 tons (27.70 million gallons) of oil actually spilled into the Yellow Sea.
“It’s enormous. That’s at least as large as the official estimate of the Exxon Valdez disaster” in Alaska, he told The Associated Press. The size of the offshore area affected by the spill is likely more than 400 square miles (1,000 square kilometers), he added.
The estimates, though rough, could complicate China’s efforts to move on from its latest environmental disaster: Dalian’s mayor already declared a “decisive victory” in the oil spill cleanup, state media reported this week.
The spill has caused at least one death when a cleanup worker drowned in the sticky crude, and thousands of Dalian residents have used everything from their bare hands to chopsticks to pick the goo from the sea.
Steiner, who worked on the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, announced the China estimates after touring the oil spill area as a consultant for the environmental group Greenpeace China.
It is habitual for governments and oil companies to understate the size of an oil spill, and to understate the environmental impact of an oil or chemical spill, and to overstate the impact of their response,” said Richard Steiner, an oil spill expert with the University of Alaska invited by Greenpeace to help conduct investigations in the area. “But the severity of the discrepancy is unusual here.”
An official with Dalian’s propaganda department told The Associated Press he was not aware of Steiner’s estimates and had no comment.
“I think we should follow the figures released by the city government,” said the man, who gave his surname as Li.
According to Steiner, firefighters at the scene later told Greenpeace China that workers had let oil escape from other tanks in the area to reduce the risk that another nearby tank containing the chemical dimethylbenzene would explode as well.
The oil terminal is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume.
Steiner said his estimates came from the fact the oil storage tank that was destroyed had a capacity of about 90,000 tons (27.70 million gallons) and reportedly had just been filled by the tanker.
He said his lower estimate of 60,000 tons (18.47 million gallons) came from the rate of oil recovery by thousands of fishing boats dispatched for the cleanup.
“They’ve already collected more oil than the official estimate of the spill size,” he told The Associated Press.
He praised the makeshift cleanup efforts: “Very low-tech. The thing is that it worked.”
But he said the thousands of cleanup workers face possible health concerns after being told to help out, receiving no protective gear and being coated in crude.
In addition, this year’s shellfish harvest has been wiped out, causing tens of millions of dollars of economic losses, he said. And many miles (kilometers) of beaches, the jewel of Dalian’s tourist industry, remain heavily oiled.
Some Chinese environmental experts have said the oil spill’s effects around Dalian, once named China’s most livable city, will be felt for years.
Both Steiner and Greenpeace China warned their oil spill estimates could be 50 percent off because of the lack of information about the spill and expressed their frustration, putting “information transparency” at the top of their list of demands Friday.
“(The oil) could have spread to North Korea by now. As far as we know, nobody knows,” Steiner told the news conference.
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