Chinese officials said one of the nation's worst oil spills had 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.
"This is a victory," the city's mayor, Li Wancai, said on 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 local fishermen and residents with cleaning up the spill, which occurred after a pipeline explosion July 16. The clean-up consisted of spraying oil-dispersant chemicals, planting oil-consuming bacteria and scooping up the thickest part of the oil into plastic barrels.
There were no casualties in the explosion and ensuing fire, though 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 in other areas is still extensive.
Han Xu, a member of Greenpeace, which has been involved in clean-up efforts in Dalian since the explosion, says some nearby bays and other parts of the water are still covered in the slick. Fishing has been banned until the end of summer, and some aquaculture farms are already seeing their crop output drop drastically.
"More devastating are the beaches that are totally covered in oil," Han said.
Many of the beaches along Dalian's long shoreline have been closed indefinitely after winds washed the oil toward land last week. The thick, sticky black substance covered rocks and pebbles on the sand, and thin patches of oil could be seen in the water.
Han said local 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 detrimental effects on the environmental could be seen for the next 30 to 40 years, if not longer. It depends on the amount of oil actually spilled, the chemicals used to disperse the spill and, most importantly, how much of the oil was extracted from the water.
Government officials acknowledge that the clean-up campaign is not over. Li said 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, sending flames hundreds of feet into the air. Fire 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.
By comparison, the U.S. oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is estimated to have spilled from 94 million to 184 million gallons of oil. 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.
