‘Completely and Utterly Frustrated’ by Oil Spill, Key Executive Admits : Environment: Jumbo jets are bringing in equipment from around the world to help control the Gulf slick.

Two jumbo jets loaded with oil-spill fighting equipment were scheduled to arrive here today to help contain a widening slick in the Persian Gulf, but a senior oil executive said that officials are “completely and utterly frustrated” in trying to clean up the giant spill.

“Nobody has ever seen a spill this size. The whole world hasn’t got enough equipment to deal with it,” said Fred Costello, a senior operations adviser at Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s giant oil-producing company.

Favorable winds have held the southernmost fingers of the slick away from key industrial facilities, but sticky patches of oil have begun washing up on beaches at Safaniyah on the northern Saudi Arabian coast, and scientists say the bulk of the slick is still beyond their view in the war zone off the shores of Kuwait.

Meanwhile, oil appears to be continuing to flow from the Mina al Bakr oil terminal in southern Iraq, feeding a second large slick in the northern Gulf that U.S. military observers have said is now 12 miles long and 3 miles wide, according to Saudi Oil Ministry officials.

Based on sketchy data from satellite photos and military overflights, the second slick appears to have broken into two patches, both of which have moved southeast of Bubiyon Island off the Kuwaiti coast, the officials said.

Precise tracking of the slicks has been impossible, they said, because reports from the Navy have conflicted with satellite data; scientists combatting the spills in Saudi Arabia have been frustrated in their attempts even to measure the volume of the spills because war action keeps them from surveying affected areas.

Twice-a-day monitoring flights have been reduced to once a day, in part because they can fly only as far north as Ras al Mishab, well south of the Saudi-Kuwaiti border.

“This is absolutely just the beginning,” Costello said of the oil that has come ashore in Saudi Arabia so far, primarily from two smaller spills, one from a damaged Iraqi tanker and one from an oil storage tank in the Saudi border city of Khafji that apparently was hit by Iraqi artillery fire.

“What you’re seeing in this little area, which is what we’re trying to combat at the moment, is purely a dress rehearsal,” he said.

“The very big oil spill, the 10-million-barrel oil spill, is up here,” he said, pointing to a sector on the map off Kuwait. “When you consider that the Exxon Valdez spilled a quarter of a million barrels and we’re now talking about 10 million barrels and you don’t have the enormous Pacific Ocean to clean it . . . there’s no way you can flush the water in and out of (the Gulf) often enough to clean it up.”

Protective rubber booms have been placed around industrial facilities and seawater desalination plants, which supply two-thirds of the water to the Arabian Peninsula’s 18 million residents. So far, the booms have adequately protected desalination plants at Safaniyah and Tanajib, where some oil has washed ashore, Saudi Arabia’s Oil Spill Response Center reported.

Workers were laboring furiously to install similar protection at Jubayl, down the coast, where a huge desalination plant produces more than half of Saudi Arabia’s domestic water.

Because favorable winds have slowed the advance of the spill to slightly more than a mile a day, the oil is not expected to reach Jubayl for another four days, said an official at the response center.

Saudi Arabia has put out a worldwide emergency request for spill-fighting equipment, and two planeloads of equipment were scheduled to arrive from Norway and Japan today, along with a team of Norwegian experts. Another Boeing 747 full of equipment from Japan is to arrive Thursday.

The United States, Germany, Britain, France, South Korea and Sweden have also sent equipment, and U.S. and British environmental experts are part of the international response team.

“Perhaps a horror movie should be made of this thing, a big, black floating thing,” said Prince Abdullah ibn Faisal ibn Turki, head of the royal commission that oversees Jubayl.

Abdullah called for declaring the Gulf an “international disaster area” and appealed for worldwide help in containing the spill, which some officials say is now about 100 miles long and resting about 17 miles offshore.

An Aramco official who has been videotaping the slick by air for the response center said that so far he has seen no damage to the area’s sea gulls, which apparently avoid the oil by landing on oil platforms and other resting spots in the Gulf.

But much of the oil appears to lie below the surface, said the official, who asked not to be identified. “It looks like if you took an ink pad and you put it in a pan of water and you dumped some ink in there and moved the pan around, it disperses the ink. It’s not floating right now. It’s kind of below the surface.”

Scientists say that a large portion of the oil is expected to coagulate and sink to the bottom before surface skimmers can remove it. The ultimate effect of heavy metallic elements from the toxic petroleum in the water cannot be calculated.

This report was compiled in part from combat pool dispatches reviewed by military censors.