South Korea to tighten rules against spill-prone oil tankers

Yahoo News 21 Dec 07;

SEOUL (AFP) — South Korea plans to bring forward a ban on visits by single-hulled tankers following the country's worst oil spill, a maritime official said Friday.

A drifting barge smashed into the 147,000-ton Hong Kong-registered supertanker Hebei Spirit on December 7 in the Yellow Sea, holing it in three places.

The single-hulled tanker spilt 12,547 kiloliters (10,900 tonnes) of crude oil into the Yellow Sea, some 20 percent more than the initial estimate, maritime authorities said.

Scores of fish farms and miles of beaches along a section of the west coast were fouled.

"Following the accident, we plan to advance the timetable to phase out singled-hulled vessels," Lee Ki-Sang, deputy director of the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, told AFP.

He said South Korea originally planned to phase out visits by those vessels by 2015 but it is now considering advancing the deadline by up to five years.

International efforts have been underway to require oil tankers to be double-hulled.

Such ships have some 1.2 meters (four feet) between the outer hull and fuel tanks to safeguard against leaks following a collision, said Bernd Bluhm, a representative from the European Maritime Safety Agency.

The European Union is seeking to close its waters to single-hulled tankers starting next year, he told a press conference held a fortnight after the spillage.

"But I don't think single-hulled tankers will disappear. They will sail in other areas, including Asia," Bluhm said.

Vladimir Sakharov, a representative from the United Nations Environment Programme, said experts from the UN and European Union had been impressed at the "spirit of solidarity" by thousands of South Koreans volunteers who joined the clean-up.

But Olof Linden, an oil spill expert working for the UN, warned that excessive clean-up operations would cause additional damage to the ecological system. He said Mother Nature should be given a chance to do the rest of the job.

Local environmentalists say it may be years before the coastline can fully recover, despite the daily efforts of tens of thousands of people and hundreds of ships battling the spill.

The European Union, the United Nations and Japan have despatched environmental experts to assist the cleanup. Aid has also come from Singapore, China and the United States.

South Korea seeks arrests over oil spill
Reuters 21 Dec 07;

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea's coastguard has applied for court permission to arrest the captains of the vessels that collided in early December causing the country's worst oil spill, an official said on Friday.

Human error was probably to blame for the accident, when a crane mounted on a Samsung-owned barge punched holes in a Hong Kong-registered tanker, spilling over 10,500 tones of crude oil that washed up on west coast beaches and blackened a nature reserve, local media said.

"We sought arrest warrants for the four captains yesterday (Thursday)," said a Taean Coastguard official.

The four are the captain of the Hebei Spirit tanker, the captains of two tugboats towing the barge and the person responsible for the sea-bound crane.

The barge operators were suspected of failing to heed warnings not to take the crane out in rough waters and the captain may not have responded properly to emergency calls, Yonhap news agency cited a coastguard report as saying.

A towline between the crane of one of the tugboats severed about 15 minutes before the accident on December 7 and the tanker did not move out of the way in time, the report said.

Coastguard officials declined to comment on the report.

A conservation group said several thousand birds may have been contaminated with oil.

"While great efforts have been made to clean a few oil-contaminated birds, it is apparent that the existing infrastructure is completely inadequate to deal with the large numbers of birds presently affected," said the report from Birds Korea.

Tens of thousands of volunteers, soldiers and others have battled to clean the spill that hit coastline about 150 km (95 miles) southwest of Seoul. Environmental groups said oil now sitting on the sea bed will cause problems for years.

Most of beaches have been cleaned but local residents say their livelihoods have been ruined because the spill wiped out fisheries and the tourism industry had dried up.

(Reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Jessica Kim; Editing by Alex Richardson)