DESERT STORM: DAY 9 : Military

Iraq has sabotaged Kuwait’s main supertanker loading pier, dumping millions of gallons of oil into the Persian Gulf, officials said today. The spill posed both environmental and strategic concerns. In Washington, White House presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said the crude oil spill could surpass the nearly 11 million gallons that the Exxon Valdez tanker leaked into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. One gulf-based oil industry official said the spill, already serious, would become “a disaster” if Iraqi President Saddam Hussein set the slick on fire. Marine Maj. Gen. Robert Johnston said the spill is “in enemy territory. We can’t just go in and shut it off.” And officials said the spill could threaten Saudi drinking water supplies by damaging water desalination plants on the gulf.

Iraqi missiles with conventional warheads slipped by U.S. Patriot air defense systems and struck the Tel Aviv and Haifa areas, killing one person and injuring about 40, the army said. Patriots destroyed at least two of the seven Scud missiles fired from western Iraq but only damaged others, army spokesmen said.

There were indications that the nonstop allied bombing of Iraq and Kuwait is cutting off some supplies to Iraqi troops, the U.S. military command said in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Iraqi prisoners of war were covered with lice and open sores and told their captors they had been receiving only one meal a day in Iraq, the military said.