 Fish Killed by Oil
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Aug. 15, 2003 — Thousands of tons of leaked oil have destroyed young mangroves and affected fish life off Pakistan's Arabian Sea port city of Karachi, environmentalists said Friday, a day after a marooned oil tanker began breaking up.
"We have seen seedlings of mangroves everywhere in a 16-kilometer (10-mile) area which shows the new generation of mangroves has vanished," said Tahir Qureshi, a coastal ecosystems specialist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
"Small fish are being badly affected and the larger ones which migrated will never return to us."
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The Greek-registered MT Tasman Spirit, stranded in a shallow channel 100 meters (yards) from Karachi's busy commercial port since running aground on July 27, began breaking up Thursday.
Of its original cargo of 62,000 tons of crude, 20,000 tons had already been transferred from the ship. Some 35,000 tons remained on board after an estimated 7,000 tons seeped into the surrounding area, port authorities said.
A foul-smelling slick has covered the city's popular Clifton Beach for most of the past week, triggering an exodus from its luxury seaside bungalows.
Police and paramilitaries have cordoned off 16 kilometers of the city's 40-kilometer coastline, and declared Clifton Beach a restricted area.
Qureshi said coastal areas west of Karachi, the seasonal breeding grounds of the rare green and Olive Ridley turtles, were in danger of being hit by the blackish sludge.
"The radius of oil-affected area in the sea is widening and may hit the western coast as well," he said.
Port authorities have called in two helicopters and two C-130 planes to spray dispersants and emulsify the sludge-hit water, while operations to clean up the beach and mangroves were underway.
"Whatever quantity of oil reached our mangrove forests is being soaked up and cleaned," Karachi Port Trust general manager Iftikhar Arshad told AFP.
Efforts to unload the remaining 35,000 tons of oil would begin once the ship had totally separated, he said.
"We are waiting for a few linkages still intact to separate so that a formal operation to unload the remaining oil could be launched," he said.
He said a contingency plan had been prepared to prevent further oil spills.
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