Gulf’s Fishing Industry Is All but Wiped Out by Oil Spill : Environment: Bahrain appeals for international help to fight the slick. Damage is expected to persist for years. : <i> “Why risk fishing in dangerous waters, when you can live safely ashore.” --</i> Arabic proverb

Long before the first oil was discovered near here a scant 60 years ago, transforming the Arabian sand dunes into some of the priciest real estate in the world, the people lived off the sea.

The glistening waters of the Persian Gulf--the brilliant aquamarine color of Los Angeles swimming pools--are home to an abundance of fish, shrimp, crabs and lobsters, not to mention dolphin and turtles, which have fed the people who live along the coast for hundreds of years.

But the marine environment is now threatened as never before by the Gulf War. Huge slicks of oil--one 30 times as large as the Exxon Valdez disaster that devastated the Alaskan shoreline in 1989--are drifting south toward the coasts of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“This disaster is going to be around for a long time,” said Walter J. Vreeland, an American adviser to Bahrain’s Environmental Protection Committee. “It could affect the Gulf’s environment for years.”

The Gulf is only 650 miles long and 220 miles wide, narrowing to just 35 miles at the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow neck of the Gulf means that it takes years for pollutants to be flushed out of the waterway. Flotsam from an Iranian airliner shot down in 1988, for instance, has just begun to reach the Arabian Sea.

The oil spill, as well as the intrusion of hundreds of foreign naval vessels and mounting concerns about Iraqi mines, have nearly wiped out the region’s fishing industry, one of the few indigenous employment opportunities apart from the oil industry and civil service. More ominously, the war now threatens to deprive the Gulf nations of a key source of food.

“It is a disaster to live on an island surrounded by the sea and not be able to catch a fish,” said Bahraini Information Minister Tarik Moayyid, who appealed Monday to the world community for equipment and expertise to help fight the slick.

While the Gulf region now boasts huge supermarkets with butter from Denmark, mutton from Australia and milk from New Zealand, seafood dominates the souks where the middle classes still prefer to shop. Caught the same day, the fish are splayed out in wicker baskets and usually sold early, before the heat of the day can spoil them.

Already, even though the oil slicks are far to the north, fish prices are rising sharply. Chan’ad, or king mackerel, which is in season, usually costs about $2.50 a pound, but the price is now over $3. Nobody is bargaining.

“People are buying more fish and freezing them,” said Adel Abdullah, a fishmonger at Manama’s central market. “They are afraid the oil will hit Bahrain and there won’t be any more fish.”

In Saudi Arabia, the giant Saudi Fisheries Co. scaled back its operations after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2. But since the start of the war, and the huge oil slick that came with it, the company has simply stopped fishing in the Gulf.

“We’re talking about a catastrophe; we are expecting the worst,” said Nasser Othman Saleh, the company’s general manager. “The fishing area will die out for 10 years or more.”

Saudi Fisheries, which employs 1,200 people and 25 trawlers, has already laid off 125 fishermen and sent its trawlers to the Red Sea. Saleh said his boats cannot navigate through oil slicks, and even if they could, “whatever you catch might be tainted by oil.”

As a result, he expects the company to lose between $10 million and $11 million this year, though he believes the 80 tons of shrimp that the company has in the freezer can be stretched out over the year.

The problems are compounded in Bahrain, where there are 4,000 fishermen, because the government has banned boats from going out at night, the traditional time when fishermen cast their nets. Now, only those fishermen who use seabed traps are able to catch fish.

“You can only catch shrimp and mackerel at night,” said Jassim Qaseer, head of fisheries in Bahrain’s Ministry of Commerce. “The amount of fish coming ashore is very low.”

Qaseer noted, with a hint of humiliation, that Bahrain had never before imported shrimp, as it is now being forced to do from Oman.

“The fishing business is destroyed,” said Yosuf Divai, whose father and grandfather were fishermen. Reaching into the side pocket of his flowing winter robe, he pulled out 27 dinars, about $80, which his boats earned that day. After paying for fuel and crew, he reckons he will take home about $21.

Divai said his boats, limited now to daytime operations, are continually harassed by U.S. Navy patrols, which are obviously fearful of a terrorist attack against one of the U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf.

“Nobody is working, nobody is selling the fish,” he complained. “Everyone is afraid.”

Divai recalled a 1983 spill in Nowruz, Iran, which dumped 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf; that one was not nearly as bad as the current spill because Gulf fishermen could maneuver around it, he said. Yet remnants of that spill are still visible along Bahrain’s coast, like a bathtub ring in the sand. From the air, that oil can still be seen through the clear waters on the sea bottom, like black paint daubed by a deranged artist.

Although the 1983 spill and subsequent sinking of oil tankers seriously polluted the Gulf, environmental experts like Vreeland dispute the notion that the Gulf has turned into a lifeless sewer.

“There’s a long-term impact of oil, and yet you find some areas that are almost pristine,” Vreeland said. “The idea that the Gulf is a toilet for oil and ecologically insignificant is not true.”

A report drawn up at the start of the conflict by the London-based World Conservation Monitoring Center said there were more than 3,650 animal species found in the area around Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, including 50 species recognized as threatened.

“The Gulf is represented by at least four critical marine habitats--coastal marshes and mud flats, coral reefs, sea-grass beds and mangroves,” the report said. “The spillage of large quantities of oil into this fertile but vulnerable marine environment is likely to create one of the worst marine ecological disasters to date. In size it dwarfs the Exxon Valdez in Alaska and, because of the biological richness of the Gulf waters, it is likely to have much more serious ecological repercussions.”

The Gulf spill is in reality three different oil spills, one from northern Saudi Arabia, one from Kuwait and one from Iraq. The one from Kuwait--an estimated 11 million barrels--is the largest spill on record. But the three spills have begun to break up and intertwine, changing from soupy black to a chocolate mousse consistency and then into mile-long ribbons of oil.

The allied forces have accused Iraq of unleashing the oil in an act of “environmental terrorism.” Iraq said the oil was released by allied air raids against oil installations in Kuwait.

Officials struggling to deal with the oil slick admit that available floating booms and skimmers are being dedicated to the top priority, protecting the region’s human needs: desalination plants, which make fresh water from seawater, power stations and industrial sites. Wildlife areas are being assigned the lowest priority.

Fighting a spill in the open ocean is difficult at the best of times, said Canadian Coast Guard expert Colin Hendry. In a war zone, it could prove almost impossible. The time factor is also running against the cleanup: After a long time in water, oil loses its buoyancy and forms tar balls that sink to the bottom and can be swept under the booms.

The consequences of the spill may take years to assess. For example, sea-grass beds are feeding grounds for everything from shrimp to the massive dugongs--cousins of the Florida manatee. Destruction of these areas could wipe out such wildlife.

“We’ve always depended on fish. We’ve always been seafarers,” said Bahrain’s Moayyid. “To turn this into a black lake will be a disaster.”