SOUTH KOREA: December 24, 2007
SEOUL - South Korea's coastguard has applied for court permission to arrest
the captains of the vessels that collided in early December causing the
country's worst oil spill, an official said on Friday.
Human error was probably to blame for the accident, when a crane mounted on
a Samsung-owned barge punched holes in a Hong Kong-registered tanker,
spilling over 10,500 tones of crude oil that washed up on west coast beaches
and blackened a nature reserve, local media said.
"We sought arrest warrants for the four captains yesterday (Thursday)," said
a Taean Coastguard official.
The four are the captain of the Hebei Spirit tanker, the captains of two
tugboats towing the barge and the person responsible for the sea-bound
crane.
The barge operators were suspected of failing to heed warnings not to take
the crane out in rough waters and the captain may not have responded
properly to emergency calls, Yonhap news agency cited a coastguard report as
saying.
A towline between the crane of one of the tugboats severed about 15 minutes
before the accident on Dec. 7 and the tanker did not move out of the way in
time, the report said.
Coastguard officials declined to comment on the report.
A conservation group said several thousand birds may have been contaminated
with oil.
"While great efforts have been made to clean a few oil-contaminated birds,
it is apparent that the existing infrastructure is completely inadequate to
deal with the large numbers of birds presently affected," said the report
from Birds Korea.
Tens of thousands of volunteers, soldiers and others have battled to clean
the spill that hit coastline about 150 km (95 miles) southwest of Seoul.
Environmental groups said oil now sitting on the sea bed will cause problems
for years.
Most of beaches have been cleaned but local residents say their livelihoods
have been ruined because the spill wiped out fisheries and the tourism
industry had dried up. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz and Jessica Kim; Editing
by Alex Richardson)
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
