A Glut That Is All Too Visible

By Kenneth W. Banta

As ministers fiddle, a menacing oil slick continues to spread

Oil has been the font of their prosperity for decades, but now the wealthy sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf are almost literally swimming in the gooey, black liquid. Since March, three damaged Iranian wells have been spewing some 7,000 bbl. a day of crude into the waters of the gulf, producing an oil slick that is roughly the size of New Jersey and that may rank as the second largest in history.* Much of the menacing sludge rests just below the surface of the gulf's usually crystalline waters, but it is betrayed by a bluish sheen that can be seen easily from the air. Last week, as the vast slick threatened to wash ashore, it triggered a near panic in the eight nations that border on the gulf.

The spill endangers marine life as well as industrial installations along the shoreline. The gravest threat is to the huge desalination plants that Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the other arid nations depend on for their drinking water. From Saudi Arabia to the Straits of Hormuz last week, armies of workmen were ringing the shore with floating plastic booms designed to protect the plants' intake valves. Meanwhile, panicky shoppers in Qatar went on a hoarding spree, pushing the price of bottled mineral water to almost $1 a liter--more than five times the OPEC price for crude oil. Officials from Iran and the seven Arab states that border on the gulf belatedly decided to meet in Kuwait to search for a solution to the problem, but the politics of the 2 1/2-year-old Iran-Iraq war quickly got in the way. At week's end there was no agreement on how to cap the gushers, much less on how to clean up the resulting mess. Even as the ministers spoke, patches of tar started to wash up on Bahrain's sandy beaches.

The spill began in late January, when a storm toppled a rig in Iran's Nowruz oil field at the northern tip of the gulf. The well had already been damaged two years ago, when a tanker rammed the platform, causing almost 2,000 bbl. a day to pour into the sea. In March, Iraqi helicopter gunships bombed at least two other wells in the same oil field. Those wells began leaking up to 5,000 additional bbl. a day.

Ordinarily such leaks are repaired within weeks. Iran says that it sent experts to inspect the damage, but that they were bombarded by the Iraqis in air attacks. On March 2, Iraq announced that any ships that came near the damaged platforms would be treated as military targets. Iranian officials say they had offered Texan Red Adair, the world's best-known oil troubleshooter, $1 million to supervise a repair effort, but that he refused to work under war-time conditions. The immense slick developed, says a Western diplomat in Bahrain, because "no one will go out there and cap a well unless he's sure he is not going to be shot at."

The 250,000 bbl. of oil now floating around the gulf will cause extensive, and permanent, damage to the gulf. Only small fragments of the glutinous mass have washed ashore thus far, but a small change in the predominantly southeasterly wind could drive the main body of the slick onto hundreds of miles of Arab coastline. Says an environmentalist in the gulf: "The slick is not going to go around looking for a home forever." In Qatar alone, the tide of oil could close down two desalination plants that now produce 37 million gal. of fresh water daily, most of the supply for the population of 250,000. Even small amounts of oil would jam the plants' delicate machinery.

The gulf is a fertile breeding ground for jumbo shrimp and more than 200 kinds of fish, including tuna and sea bass. Although the extent of damage to marine life is not yet known, dead fish are already washing ashore in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Some officials fear that the contamination may destroy a year's catch of some varieties.

Attempts to find a political solution that would allow experts to go into the area of the spill have been stymied by the bitterness of the war between Iran and Iraq. At the urging of the smaller gulf states, officials from the United Nations last week agreed to oversee the cease-fire and repair work on the wells. But at the Kuwait meeting, efforts to negotiate the details of an accord stalled amid endless bickering. Iraq insisted that any cease-fire agreement prevent Iran from using the delay to rearm. In turn, the Iranians charged that the Iraqis secretly hope to turn any temporary cease-fire into a formal end to the war. Iran also demanded that Iraq admit culpability for the March attack on the oil wells. Iraq refused, arguing that the bombing had been an accident. Said a frustrated Western diplomat: "Who cares if it is called a cease-fire or safe passage or what? The point is to stop the spillage and clean up the mess."

In fact, both Iran and Iraq have reasons for exacerbating the disaster. Iraq hopes that a delay will increase the pressure on Arab countries to call for a broader cease-fire in the war that Iraq started in 1980 and that it is now eager to end. Iran, on the other hand, may expect the deteriorating environment to help split Iraq from Saudi Arabia and the smaller gulf states, which have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into the Iraqi war effort. If such hopes are being nurtured in the Iranian capital of Tehran, they are unrealistic. Both sides in the Iran-Iraq war are, as a Western diplomat puts it, "obsessed with getting the maximum military and propaganda advantage" from the spill. Under the shadow of such rampant obstructionism, the nations of the gulf seem doomed to deal with an ever more visible oil glut.

--By Kenneth W. Banta. Reported by Robert C. Wurmstedt/Bahrain

* The record holder: a 1979 spill off the east coast of Mexico that took nine months to cap.

With reporting by Robert C. Wurmstedt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.