BEIJING — China’s largest reported oil spill emptied beaches along the Yellow Sea as its size doubled Wednesday, while cleanup efforts included straw mats and frazzled workers with little more than rubber gloves.
An official warned the spill posed a “severe threat” to sea life and water quality as China’s latest environmental crisis spread off the shores of Dalian, once named China’s most livable city.
One cleanup worker has drowned, his body coated in crude.
“I’ve been to a few bays today and discovered they were almost entirely covered with dark oil,” said Zhong Yu with environmental group Greenpeace China, who spent the day on a boat inspecting the spill.
“The oil is half solid and half liquid and is as sticky as asphalt,” she said by telephone.
The oil had spread over 165 square miles of water in five days since a pipeline at the busy northeastern port exploded, hurting oil shipments from part of China’s strategic oil reserves to the rest of the country. Shipments remained reduced Wednesday.
State media have said no more oil is leaking into the sea, but the total amount of oil spilled is not yet clear.
Greenpeace China released photos Wednesday of inky beaches and of straw mats about 21 square feet in size scattered on the sea, meant to absorb the oil.
Fishing in the waters around Dalian has been banned through the end of August, the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported.
“The oil spill will pose a severe threat to marine animals, and water quality, and the seabirds,” Huang Yong,deputy bureau chief for the city’s Maritime Safety Administration, told Dragon TV.
At least one person died during cleanup efforts. A 25-year-old firefighter, Zhang Liang, drowned Tuesday after a wave threw him from a vessel, Xinhua reported.
Officials, oil company workers and volunteers were turning out by the hundreds to clean blackened beaches.
“We don’t have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks,” an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper.
But 40 oil-skimming boats and about 800 fishing boats were also deployed to clean up the spill, and Xinhua reported that more than 9 miles of oil barriers had been set up to keep the slick from spreading.
China Central Television earlier reported an estimated 1,500 tons of oil has spilled. That would amount roughly to 9,524 barrels - as compared with 2.23 million barrels to 4.38 million barrels in the BP oil spill off the U.S. coast. There are 42 gallons in a barrel.
China’s State Oceanic Administration released the latest size of the contaminated area in a statement Tuesday.
The cause of the explosion that started the spill was still not clear. The pipeline is owned by China National Petroleum Corp., Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer by volume.
Information for this article was contributed from Beijing by Yu Bing of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 10 on 07/22/2010