U.S. Bombing Appears to Halt Gulf Oil Spill

A gush of crude oil feeding a major slick in the Persian Gulf apparently was halted by a U.S. bombing raid on oil pumping facilities in Kuwait, but not before it dumped a record 11 million barrels of oil into the fragile waterway, military and government officials said Monday.

As experts from the United States and Britain arrived in Saudi Arabia to combat the spill, a U.S. military spokesman said the Saturday night attack on inland pipeline complexes that direct crude toward the giant Sea Island loading terminal appeared to have stopped the hemorrhage of new oil into the gulf.

“It appears that we have stopped the flow of oil, but we continue to seek confirmation of that fact,” Army Brig. Gen. Pat Stevens IV told reporters in Riyadh. The size of a fire at the source of the spill, an indication of whether fresh oil is still being piped to the offshore complex, “appears to have diminished,” he said.

At a subsequent Pentagon briefing, Navy Capt. David Herrington conceded that military officials are hampered by the lack of any fresh surveillance of the site, but said that “our assessment is at this point in time it is probably down to a trickle, if at all.”

The upbeat analyses by military officials drew skeptical responses from some oil industry experts. A senior Saudi official said small amounts of crude continue to feed the spill, and added that it still poses an immediate threat to petrochemical facilities and water desalination plants along the entire eastern coast of Saudi Arabia over the next several days.

“It was being ferociously pumped into the sea, and that has been reduced. It’s almost now like an ordinary flow from a spill,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s still quite bad.”

Derek Brown, technical adviser to the Gulf Area Companies Mutual Aid Organization, created to coordinate industry response to a spill, said in an interview from Bahrain that it would be impossible to stop the flow of oil by aerial bombing. Brown has visited the terminal several times.

“As an oil industry man, I don’t see how it could have stopped the spill because this tank farm runs by gravity to the sea anyway, and you can’t stop gravity,” Brown said in a telephone interview. “Not even the military could have done that. I suspect you could have damaged some of the pipes and slowed the flow, but you can’t stop it until the tanks are empty.”

In the attack, U.S. fighter-bombers blew up installations that act as manifolds to direct crude collected from oil fields into pipes running to the offshore facility, where supertankers are loaded.

By knocking out these inland facilities, military strategists hoped to sever the flow of fresh oil to the offshore terminus, which had been set ablaze in a skirmish Friday night between a U.S. Navy ship and an Iraqi gunboat. It was thought that fire would burn out any remaining crude already in the system between the manifolds and the offshore facility.

At 11 million barrels, the oil spill easily exceeds a 1979 well blowout that poured 4.2 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The previous worst oil disaster in the Persian Gulf occurred in 1983, when Iraqi forces destroyed wells from Iran’s Nowruz oil field and spilled up to 2 million barrels of crude.

“We know it is huge,” a Saudi Petroleum Ministry official said Monday. “It is the largest in human history. And it is the first deliberate slick,” he said, referring to allied officials’ claims that Iraq deliberately opened the taps at Sea Island and pumped the oil into the gulf.

“We also know that it is going to hit. Some pieces will definitely hit, but how much, you really don’t know, because this is really very huge, plus you don’t know the direction of the wind. It might change overnight. There are many question marks. It’s really a very interesting situation for us, because almost every hour, the assessment changes.”

Saudi authorities on Monday were marshaling a massive international effort to prevent the spill from damaging critical coastal industrial facilities, and a rescue and treatment center for injured wildlife was set up to begin treating birds soaked with petroleum.

A team of experts from the U.S. Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Navy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration arrived in Riyadh on Monday and headed for the gulf to make recommendations on control and cleanup plans. A second team from Britain’s Southampton Oil Spill Response Center was on its way with oil collection booms and skimmers. Norway reportedly has dispatched a large oil skimming vessel to the gulf.

Two large water desalination plants at the giant petrochemical city of Jubayl and, further south, at Al Khubar, were a focus of concern since a large portion of the nation’s water supply, about 322 million gallons a day, is generated from gulf desalination plants.

At Jubayl, workers laid out more large rubber booms and prepared to install filters around the large intake pipes through which most of the facilities draw in water for desalination and for cooling machinery.

Authorities also were studying the possibility of using chemical dispersants and subsurface nets to catch any sinking tar balls before they could be sucked into intake pipes. And the Saudi Meteorological and Environmental Protection Agency was bringing in extra booms and equipment to skim petroleum from the surface of the water.

“We have one or two small booms already in place, but we never expected a disaster on this scale,” said Prince Abdullah ibn Faisal ibn Turki, secretary general for the commission that oversees the industrial city. Jubayl’s best hope, he said, is that the slick will remain offshore as it moves south.

“We’re all standing on the beach and blowing,” he said, “hoping it will go away.”

Environmental officials have cautioned that even trace amounts of oil in the water could endanger water supplies if drawn into desalination plant inlets. Accordingly, plant engineers are monitoring water samples at least nine times a day, said Salman Dossary, plant manager at Al Khubar.

Seawater is drawn into the plant 13 feet below the surface and is unlikely to be affected by a surface slick, he said. But he said that if booms cannot keep the slick at bay, it is likely the plant will have to be shut down.

“It can’t produce (under those circumstances),” he said. “If the problem is really serious and it’s getting worse, to safeguard the plant it has to be shut down. It is the last measure we will take, I hope we are not going to take it, and I am confident we are not going to take it.”

U.S. officials said the slick was moving south at the rate of 15 miles a day, but a second day of offshore winds slowed its progress and held it a few miles offshore.

Oil damage near the northern Saudi border at Khafji was probably caused by a second, smaller spill from an oil tank damaged by Iraqi artillery fire that has been halted, according to Petroleum Ministry officials.

Farther south, in Bahrain, workers were laying out booms to protect desalination plants, industrial facilities and a highly productive mangrove area. But that country’s oil spill contingency plan assumed only a 5,000-barrel spill, and authorities complained they lacked the equipment to protect sensitive environmental sites from the 11-million-barrel slick heading their way.

“The fishing industry, recreational beaches, marinas, marine life and bird life--those we are not being able to give priority to,” Brown said, “because we are dealing with other aspects at the moment.”

Brown and other environmental officials in Bahrain complained that the military is not providing the nation with the information it needs to plan for the oil’s arrival.

“They’re treating these things as military secrets,” he said. “ . . .We’re the people who know how to clean up an oil spill, not the military. If they don’t give us the information, it makes it difficult to move on this.”

Saudi officials said it is difficult to get precise information on the status of the spill because military monitoring had been limited to sea observation. Also, tracking has become complicated because the spill has now broken into several patches, and some are moving in slightly different directions.

At the same time, some officials have turned their attention toward eventual cleanup of the spill, a process which some experts said might take years. Saudi Arabia’s giant oil company Aramco has taken charge of the cleanup studies and will be discussing options with international experts, he said.

New technologies may be tried out on the spill.

A spokesman for General Technology Applications Inc., a Manassas, Va.-based manufacturer, said its chairman and chief operating officer, Thomas T. Scambos, had been contacted last week by the Defense Department and was en route to Saudi Arabia on Monday for consultations with oil-spill agencies there. General Technology makes a powder that causes oil in a spill to coagulate, theoretically enabling skimmer boats or vacuums to more easily get the oil off the water.

Meanwhile, the effects of major oil fires in Kuwait at Sea Island and near the Saudi border, at Wafra also have become apparent in Saudi Arabia with slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide along the northern Saudi coast, one Saudi official said. Traces of black rain were reported in northern Saudi Arabia and across the gulf in Iran.

A fire in an oil field on the Saudi-Kuwaiti border damaged about a dozen wells, according to Texaco Inc., which operated the Wafra field with Kuwait Oil Co. The wells were capable of producing about 4,000 barrels of oil each day--just a fraction of the field’s daily production capacity.

Times staff writers Maura Dolan and Michael Parrish in Los Angeles and Charles Wallace in Manama, Bahrain, contributed to this report.