War Hampers Cleanup of Huge Oil Spill : Environment: Regional coordination has been weakened. And a bottleneck has occurred in the system for procuring equipment.

As equipment and experts stream into the Persian Gulf to combat the world’s worst oil spill, the delays and disorganization that always mark such massive calamities are being magnified by the realities of war.

“It becomes a very difficult challenge for the Saudis to fight two wars--one against the Iraqis and one against the spilled oil,” said Richard Golob, publisher of Golob’s Oil Pollution Bulletin, based in Boston. “And this is a catastrophic spill that would probably overwhelm the resources of the United States in peacetime.”

But problems beyond the dangers of war already have hindered the control effort, including a war-damaged regional coordination structure, a bottleneck within the system for procuring spill-control equipment and even some interagency confusion in the Saudi government.

The spill--estimated at more than 294 million gallons, almost 30 times the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska--began last month with an Iraqi artillery attack on Saudi oil facilities at Khafji. Buffeted by strong winds Saturday, oil from that spill was 40 miles from the giant Saudi desalination plant at Jubayl. There were conflicting reports as to whether the desalination plant at Safaniya, said to have been shut down Friday, was operating.

A second, bigger spill--which allied authorities blame on Iraq’s intentional release of oil from the Sea Island terminal off Kuwait--remained mostly north of the Saudi border in Kuwaiti waters.

Some oil industry officials are confident that the fight against the spill has gone as well as is possible in the midst of a war.

“The good news is that we had done a lot of homework before this occurred,” said Richard Holmes, a spokesman for Aramco Services Co., a Houston-based subsidiary of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s giant oil company, which is buying U.S. spill-fighting equipment. “We didn’t start with the telephone book.”

“Aramco had a lot (of spill equipment) on site and got it out on the water real quick,” added David A. Olsen, a fisheries biologist, originally from San Bernardino, who is acting as a spokesman in the Dhahran office of Saudi Arabia’s environmental agency. “They had almost all of the oil-fighting booms and equipment in the kingdom in the water within five or six days.”

But just as U.S. oil companies and state and federal agencies relaxed their spill-response mechanisms in Prince William Sound after years without a catastrophic spill, some experts fear the same attitude has prevailed in the Persian Gulf, which last saw a major spill in 1983.

“Complacency can set in,” Golob said. “I think that many of the southern Gulf nations, particularly, didn’t prepare for this worst-case scenario.”

The Saudis might not have been ready for a spill, even in peacetime.

“One of the problems facing us,” Olsen said, “is that the kingdom’s oil-spill response plan was only signed very recently. The interagency coordination within the kingdom has yet to be firmly established, though it’s being firmly established now.”

Nor is there a strong regional structure in place to coordinate response to a spill in a body of water ringed by eight nations:

* The Gulf Area Oil Companies Mutual Aid Organization, or GAOCMAO, was set up by the petroleum industry to help deal with spills. But unlike a similar system to protect U.S. waters, GAOCMAO has no spill-fighting equipment of its own--only information about equipment owned by member companies.

The Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment, or ROPME, which reportedly had been an effective organization, was headquartered in pre-invasion Kuwait. It apparently has yet to recover from its dislocation.

“One of the things the Iraqis attacked, whether deliberately or inadvertently, was the environmental infrastructure of the region,” Olsen said.

* Apparently in even worse shape is an outgrowth of ROPME called the Marine Emergency Mutual Aid Center, or MEMAC, based in Bahrain. It was meant to be a hub of information and communications in the event of a spill.

“MEMAC still functions,” Golob said, “but at a very low level, with one person available to answer telephone calls and perhaps transfer information from among member countries.” Three years ago, MEMAC lost its executive director and a year ago its assistant director departed. Neither has been replaced, Golob said.

The Saudis a week ago acknowledged that, for lack of coordination, the fight had not been going well.

At a meeting in Bahrain, Nazir Toufik, deputy director of the Saudi Meteorological and Environmental Protection Administration admitted that the Saudis didn’t know how to fight the spill. Toufik appealed for cooperation and experts from Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Iran.

The pleas were not ignored. The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council has reportedly stepped in to pick up some of the organizing activities formerly performed by ROPME. And a team from the United Nations Environment Program is in Saudi Arabia, compiling a report to be presented in about a week to the U.N. General Assembly.

But the agency has no plans at present to take direct charge of spill response.

“There are so many parties and actors,” said Noel J. Brown, director of the UNEP’s North American office in New York.

An active regional coordination center is much needed, Golob said, because how the spill is fought off the Saudi coast will strongly determine its effect to the south--in Bahrain, Qatar and the Emirates--and possibly to the east along the Iranian coastline.

In simple terms, the smaller the amount of oil that Saudi Arabia skims from the water, the greater the amount that will continue down the Gulf to other nations.

“What’s good for Saudi Arabia is bad in a sense for Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates,” Golob said.

“If there had been a regional coordination center,” he added, “a greater effort by all nations would have been made in Saudi waters . . . . But (the southern Gulf nations) haven’t sent an advance guard to Saudi Arabia to prevent the spill from ever reaching their waters.”

Meanwhile, the Meteorological and Environmental Protection Administration, which makes all the final decisions in the oil-spill battle, has been inundated with commercial offers of assistance. More than 350 private businesses worldwide have sent proposals to sell both traditional and experimental spill-fighting equipment, Olsen said, tying up the agency’s fax lines.

“We’re just being flooded with information,” he said Friday. “I’m standing in front of the fax right now and I can’t get faxes back out.”

Of course, the biggest obstacle to combating the slicks is the war that caused them.

Under other circumstances, workers would be swarming on the beaches spreading absorbent materials, or attacking the oil from boats offshore.

“But many of those things will probably not be attempted during these dangerous conditions,” Golob said. “With mines, there can be problems, for instance. And while many U.S. and foreign companies have offered to send material, when it comes to people, they are much more cautious. It’s a very unusual situation.”

Olsen reported that the Meteorological and Environmental Protection Administration is having some problems transporting material to the spill sites. And Brown said the UNEP team has found that some of the information it seeks is classified because of the conflict.

Beyond this, a longer-term cleanup could also be compromised by the necessities of war.

“The people involved in a cleanup effort would most likely come from military and civil defense groups in Saudi Arabia,” Golob said. “But these are already mobilized for the war.”

A week ago, the Saudis stated that plenty of manpower was available and others remain hopeful that these early problems will be solved.

“Overall it’s going well,” said U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Paul Milligan, a spokesman for the U.S. team of oil experts now in Saudi Arabia. And contrary to some reports, he said, “we’re not waiting for some magic overall plan.”