Japanese Effort to Clean Up Oil Spill Hits Rough Seas

Even atop the black, craggy cliffs that loom 250 feet above the thrashing Japan Sea, through heavy wind and lashing snow, the stench of oil here is piercing.

“I can smell the oil on my own breath,” said Yoshinobu Nishi, 55, a fisherman. “Come summer, I bet this beach will really stink.”

Nishi and his neighbors spent four days scraping noxious goop from the rocks of a wild and lovely but now oil-coated bay on the Noto Peninsula, an isolated, scenic hump on the back of western Japan.

Still, he believes that they have recovered only one-tenth of the congealed mess that has coated the volcanic cliffs.

What began as a serious spill on Jan. 2, when a Russian tanker carrying about 5.6 million gallons of oil ruptured and sank off the coast of western Japan, has now become a full-blown environmental disaster.

Nature preserves, bird sanctuaries, fish spawning grounds and the habitats of prized shellfish, crab, abalone and seaweed species have all been tainted. Four volunteers have died in the cleanup, presumably because of overwork and exposure to cold and the toxic oil fumes.

“It’s far worse than I imagined,” said Takaaki Yajima, professor of ecology at Kanazawa University in Ishikawa prefecture. “There has never been such extensive damage to the Japan Sea.”

Efforts to contain the spill have been thwarted by fierce storms; winter winds have blown the oil straight toward Japan. Blankets or balls of heavy oil are now washing up along more than 400 miles of shoreline, sliming some of the last unspoiled areas of the Japanese coast.

This is a slow-motion spill, but it is seemingly unstoppable. Almost a month after the tanker Nakhodka went down, oil continues to leak both from the ship’s belly and from its severed bow.

High seas washed over oil fences. The sea is too rough for skimmers. Cold, thick clumps of oil clog the pipes of equipment designed to vacuum up lighter spills. This made useless some donated equipment from Hollywood actor Kevin Costner, whose Costner Industries Nevada Corp. manufactures a machine that separates oil from water.

“On very rough seas, there just is nothing that works,” said Faith Yando, editor of the Oil Spill Intelligence Report in Arlington, Mass.

Although Japan has invested heavily in control equipment, even under the best of conditions it could expect to recover only about 15% of the oil spilled, Yando said.

On shore, volunteers armed with nothing but scoops and buckets have put in backbreaking days of scraping and hauling, only to watch helplessly as fresh black slop washes in and soils their beaches anew.

“It’s the worst oil disaster in Japanese history, and we really don’t know how long it will take for the shoreline ecology to recover,” Yajima said, noting that the extent of the environmental damage will not be known until spring.

The political damage is already evident. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto has come under fire in parliament for his government’s failure to respond faster.

If there had been immediate action, critics say, crews might have kept slicks from coming ashore. Though some say that criticism is unfair given the abominable weather, the accident has reinforced the perception of a Japanese government that is chronically tardy in times of crisis.

Moreover, the spill has worsened the Japanese public’s already negative attitude toward Russia.

The Japanese press has focused on the age of the tanker--26 years--and openly derided a report by Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency suggesting that the vessel had collided with a submarine or an explosive object.

“Beyond the bounds of common sense,” declared a headline in the Hokkoku newspaper. “Wasn’t it just old?”

A Russian Embassy official said the Tass report had not been confirmed, and there has been no official word from either Russian or Japanese authorities on what caused the tanker to fracture.

Moscow has apologized for the disaster, thanked Japanese authorities for saving the 32-member crew--the captain apparently went down with his ship--and dispatched four ships to help with the cleanup.

But the Japanese are still steaming.

Nishi said he had a look at one of the Russian rescue ships that docked at Hakodate in Hokkaido on its way to the spill.

“What a hulk,” Nishi said. “I thought, ‘This thing could sink too and spill even more oil.’ ”

The fishermen worry that their livelihoods have been destroyed, but they realize they cannot expect much compensation from desperately cash-strapped Russia.

Politicians and environmentalists, based on this incident, also worry about the possibility of future disasters--including radioactive contamination--in the Sea of Japan, which is heavily traveled by Russia’s civilian fleet as well as its nuclear-powered submarines.

“The problem is there are so many aging tankers going through the Sea of Japan,” lawmaker Kenji Kosaka said. “They are not properly insured, and we have absolutely no recourse in case of an accident.”

The Sea of Japan is especially vulnerable because it is shaped like a washbasin--deep in the middle but extremely shallow at the narrow straights near Sakhalin to the north and the Koreas to the south, ecologist Yajima said. Water exchange is limited, and any pollution will just stay put.

Even if all of the 5.6 million gallons of oil aboard the Nakhodka leaks, the spill will still only be half the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off the Alaska coast. However, the environmental impact could be just as serious.

At least 1.4 million gallons of the oil aboard the Nakhodka has already leaked, and authorities say it will be exceedingly difficult to remove whatever is left inside the broken tanker. Its bow, which ran aground off the coast near Mikuni, might still contain about 823,000 gallons of oil. Workers have constructed a ramp into the sea, but 18-foot waves have prevented them from pumping out the bow.

Meanwhile, a wreck believed to be the Nakhodka’s belly has been found on the ocean floor under about 6,600 feet of water about 95 miles off the shore of Hyogo prefecture. The belly once contained the bulk of the oil, but officials do not know how much is still inside and how much is leaking, said Yuichi Motoyama, a Maritime Safety Agency spokesman who added that “oil is bubbling up every day.”

While the technology exists to raise the wreck from such a depth, to do so would be “unbelievably expensive,” and so for practical purposes the Nakhodka must be considered unsalvageable, Motoyama said.

“The only thing we can do is collect the oil that will seep out for years and years to come,” Motoyama said.

But after days or weeks of back-breaking labor, villagers are exhausted.

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces have been dispatched to help clean beaches and have set up helicopter ferries to carry oil recovered from inaccessible beaches. But the brunt of the filthy work is being done by middle-aged and elderly residents and thousands of volunteers from across the country.

In the United States, volunteers are shooed away from spill cleanups, which are deemed too toxic for unprotected citizens.

Most of the volunteers in Japan are working with only gauze masks and heavy weather gear; many are developing health problems, including nausea, backaches, headaches, inflamed eyes and sore throats.

“We keep telling people it’s very bad to breathe the fumes from oil,” said Dr. Shigeo Miyazaki, who runs a hospital in Fukui that has treated some of the spill-related illnesses. “We are asking the local authorities to make sure everyone is wearing a proper mask and gloves, but they don’t always follow this, which is a problem.”

Many of those laboring for hours in the cold are in their 70s. Among the four volunteers who perished were a 77-year-old fisherman who dropped dead while walking home from a cleanup stint and a 53-year-old high school teacher who wanted to do the work himself before asking his students to volunteer. He collapsed on the beach while hoisting oil-filled bags onto a conveyor belt for removal.

“Until you do this, you can’t imagine how hard it is,” said Hidefumi Orita, 46, a public employee who took a vacation to help clean up the hard-hit town of Suzu on the tip of the Noto Peninsula.

Orita brought a special gas mask and found it impossible to work without it. He spent the day scooping 4-inch-thick layers of sticky goo out from between the rocks.

“A lot of people get nauseated, and it’s hard work, and it’s cold,” he said. “Your back starts to hurt because you are bent over. Your legs get wet. Your feet start to ache. You are told to rest once an hour and to stop if you feel ill, but when I see the elderly ladies working away without a break, I feel I cannot stop.”

Megumi Shimizu of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.