South Korean oil spill worse than estimated

Yahoo News 20 Dec 07;

Nearly 80,000 barrels of oil were spilled from a punctured supertanker off South Korea's western coast earlier this month — about 20 percent more than previous estimates, an official said Thursday.

Experts calculated the size of the spill after the Hebei Spirit arrived at a South Korean port Tuesday — 11 days after it was slammed by a wayward crane-carrying vessel — by determining how much oil the ship still contained, said Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry official Kim Jung-seok.

The Hong Kong-registered tanker, which initially carried 1.9 million barrels of oil, leaked the equivalent of 78,920 barrels into the water, Kim said.

That places the spill at nearly a third the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that sent 260,000 barrels of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound.

The spill — some 2 1/2 times bigger than South Korea's worst previous spill in 1995 — has severely jeopardized the ecosystem and spoiled hundreds of seafood farms in the area, which is also a prime tourism attraction.

Tens of thousands of coast guard officers, soldiers, residents and volunteer workers have been mobilized to clean up the muck. Some 37,000 people were still working Thursday with 845 ships and 10 helicopters, said Coast Guard spokesman Lee Won-yeol.

"We don't know until when we have to continue the cleanup work but believe we'll soon enter the final stage," he said.