Thousands of troops and volunteers struggled yesterday to clear a thick layer of pungent crude oil off South Korea's stricken southwest coast after the country's worst ever oil spill.
The crew of the 147,000-tonne Hebei Spirit have finally stopped it leaking, officials said, pumping the remaining oil out of the last of three containers holed by a barge in a collision on Friday.
But with more than 10,000 tonnes of crude oil spilled into the Yellow Sea and now polluting a long stretch of coastline, most of the damage has been done.
A state of disaster has been declared in the region where beaches and farms dependent on the sea have been badly affected around Taean, 120km southwest of Seoul.
More than 6,600 people, backed by 90 boats and six planes, fought to remove oil drifting at sea or washing onto beaches.
Booms were set up to contain the oil, and skimmers were working to collect and remove slicks from the water surface, the Taean coast guard said.
On the beaches, police, troops and volunteers carried buckets of sludge to huge rubber pools from which they scooped black, oil-mixed sand into sacks.
Three of five oil containers on the Hong Kong-registered tanker were holed in the collision, coast guard officials said.
Two had been emptied by Saturday, and the third was pumped dry overnight.
"The crew on the tanker was able to pump crude oil in the third damaged container into an undamaged one overnight," a coast guard official in Taean said.
"The tanker has stopped leaking since early Sunday," he said, adding "they are still mopping up oil, but it's not work to be done in a few days."
Lee Bong-gil, who heads the Korea Coast Guard's maritime pollution bureau, told Yonhap news agency: "The large size of the spill has made the containment difficult, but there will be no significant expansion of the oil considering the tide, wind and their speeds."
Local county officials said yesterday that the oil slick washing onto the beaches in Taean was already 17km long and 10m wide.
"The sea farms there are badly affected by the oil spill. No one knows how many years it will take for them to recover from the damage," said Park Tae-Soon, a county official in Taean.
He said that while there was no official damage report available yet, there were 445 sea farms in the area for oyster, abalone, clam and other seafood.
Residents near the beaches of Euihangri and Mallipo also reported pungent oil smells.
The tanker was berthed 8km off Mallipo, near waters designated as a national park, when it was struck by the barge.
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