Iraq Unleashing Oil Into Gulf : 11 Missiles Fired at Tel Aviv, Saudi Arabia; 2 Killed : Gulf War: U.S. decries ‘environmental terrorism,’ says spill off Kuwait is 12 times bigger than the Exxon Valdez disaster. Water supplies threatened; military impact unclear.

WASHINGTON —  A defiant Iraq has loosed millions of barrels of crude oil into Persian Gulf waters off Kuwait over a period of several days in what the Bush Administration on Friday branded “environmental terrorism” of an “immense and shocking magnitude.”

U.S. officials said that Iraqi forces have opened the valves on an oil-loading pipeline at the Sea Island terminal of the Al Ahmadi refinery. The terminal is about 10 miles off the Kuwaiti coast, pouring an estimated 100,000 barrels of slippery brown crude into the strategic waterway each day.

The Iraqis have also emptied the crude from five large tankers that have been moored off Kuwait city since last October, U.S. government spokesmen said. Each tanker held several hundred thousand barrels of oil.

The resulting spill has created “an enormous mess in the Persian Gulf of rather frightening consequences,” said Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams. Military officials insisted, however, that the oil spill would have no impact on the progress of Operation Desert Storm.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has long threatened to set the sea afire to thwart an allied amphibious assault. But U.S. military planners appear to have been taken by surprise by the spill and were scrambling to assess the size and danger of the spreading oil plume and to find ways to combat it.

Government officials estimated that, as of Friday, the spill involved a dozen times more crude than the Exxon Valdez disaster, the largest oil spill in U.S. history. The Valdez drenched the shores of Alaska’s Prince William Sound with 258,000 barrels of crude oil in March, 1989.

“Saddam Hussein continues to amaze the world,” President Bush said at a White House news conference.

“There’s no rationality to it,” he said. “It looks desperate; it looks last gasp. . . . It’s kind of sick.”

Bush echoed military officials in insisting that Hussein would gain “no military advantage” from the oil spill.

“It’s not going to help him at all,” the President said.

Asked whether the oil would interfere with possible Marine amphibious landings, Bush said, “No, it doesn’t interfere with anything.”

Although the President and Pentagon officials discounted the impact on military operations, the spill clearly has the potential to force allied warships to alter their sailing patterns, impede amphibious landings and foul the Saudi desalination plants that provide drinking water to the more than 700,000 allied troops in the region.

The United States has 20,000 Marines aboard ships in the Persian Gulf. They are awaiting orders to mount an amphibious assault on Kuwait as part of the allied campaign to drive Iraqi troops from the tiny oil-rich emirate.

Environmentalists expressed outrage at the act, which they said threatens Persian Gulf waters, wildlife, marshes, coral reefs and beaches.

U.S. military officials in Saudi Arabia described the slick as eight to 10 miles long and about two miles wide, moving slowly southward.

It was not known precisely when the oil release began. White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said it appeared that the oil had been pouring out of the pipeline for several days. He said Bush was briefed on the spill Thursday and again Friday by his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

“The President has been monitoring this for a couple of days,” Fitzwater said. “This is a growing problem and a very serious one. . . . We don’t have any way of knowing how vast it will be.”

Representatives of the Energy Department, the Defense Department, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and others met again Friday afternoon and scheduled another session for today.

Officials said it is likely that a team will be dispatched to the gulf over the weekend to study the environmental disaster firsthand.

Army Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that military planners had “done our studies” on the possibility of a deliberate oil spill, but he suggested that current plans did not envision a spill of this magnitude.

“No operations plan ever survives contact with the enemy,” Kelly said ruefully at a Pentagon briefing.

The general said the spill is not militarily useful to Hussein’s forces and insisted that the U.S.-led coalition participating in Operation Desert Storm “will be able to work around it.”

“I can find nothing that would make sense militarily of releasing millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf,” Kelly said. “It is the act of an international terrorist.”

But military analysts said the spill would limit operating room within the narrow gulf, perhaps forcing the United States to move its two aircraft carriers south, taking them farther from their targets in Iraq and Kuwait.

Fitzwater acknowledged that the United States had no specific plan for dealing with the spill “at this point,” and said that military activities would be adjusted to cope with it.

He said that the most obvious purpose of the Iraqi action would be to “gum up the beaches and the landing areas to the point where we’d have trouble getting an amphibious landing craft in.”

Bush said there is “a lot of activity going on right now” to determine the best way to “clean this mess up.”

“Every effort will be made to try to stop this continuing spill into the gulf and also to stop what has been done from moving further south,” the President said. “It’s a little hard to do when the man has taken over this other country, Kuwait, and is using their assets in this way. But we will try hard, and you can . . . rest assured that the scientists and the oil people (and) the military are all involved, and the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the U.S. side are all involved in the closest consultation.”

Administration sources said an interagency group has for several months been looking at the possibility that Hussein could use crude oil as a weapon, but that no plan for countering it had been adopted.

Although the oil slick would complicate any amphibious assault undertaken as part of an allied ground offensive against Iraqi forces in Kuwait, one Marine officer said a landing still would be possible--with some hitches.

Modern amphibious landings from ships offshore are conducted largely by helicopter, Hovercraft, World War II-vintage “Mike” boats and amphibious tracked vehicles called “Amtracks” that swim through the water and roll onto the beach.

Helicopters, the officer said, could swarm over the slick, Hovercraft could skim on top of it, and low-tech boats could cut through the ooze with a minimum of trouble.

Only the Amtracks, the officer said, might be adversely affected by the thick sludge, since the vehicles must stay within a few feet of the water’s surface.

“It might make it messier and slicker, but a little oil would be the least of our problems. These guys are concerned about lead, not oil,” the officer said.

Industry officials said the Pentagon’s options for coping with the spill are few.

“If it is in the middle of a war zone, it limits your options considerably,” said June Siva, manager of environmental protection for Arco in Los Angeles. “It seems your first strategy would be to try to burn it, and the only other way to handle a big spill is chemical dispersants. But I can’t imagine anybody who would volunteer to fly a dispersant plane over the oil slick in that area right now. . . . It’s just a real tragedy that he (Hussein) had to do this.”

The possibility of containing the spill with booms was quickly dismissed by Pentagon planners because boom ships and their operators would be too vulnerable to enemy fire or would require the diversion of significant numbers of allied warships and aircraft to protect them.

A Bahrain-based oil industry official said he does not think the slick will seriously hamper military operations. He said there is little that can be done other than to divert the oil away from the water intakes of desalination and power plants along the gulf coast.

“I think we are going to have to basically depend on diversionary tactics to keep the oil away from sensitive areas by deploying booms and letting it come ashore on sacrificial beaches or biodegrade in the sea,” said Derek Brown, coordinator of environmental affairs for the Bahrain Petroleum Co. “And then you go into a very long, tedious cleanup operation.”

Brown estimated that the Kuwaiti storage facilities, which he has visited several times, hold 4 million to 5 million barrels of oil. The Sea Island terminal is used for high-speed loading of supertankers and is capable of moving an estimated 100,000 barrels of crude a day.

Another expert said that burning the slick might be the best hope.

Alan A. Allen, an oil-spill specialist who heads a consulting firm based in Woodinville, Wash., said that setting the oil afire may be the only way to protect the desalination and power plants along the coast.

“From an environmental standpoint, burning would probably be the best thing to do,” said Allen, whose company, Spiltec, burned 20,000 to 30,000 gallons of oil in about 45 minutes in Prince William Sound during the Exxon Valdez spill.

“I was annoyed to hear high-ranking officials say there was nothing that could be done,” he said. “Conventional booms and skimmers, granted, have a limited rate of handling oil, a limited capacity. So when you are dealing with a really massive spill, one of the best ways to eliminate oil is to burn it.”

The Sierra Club, which opposes the Gulf War on political grounds, condemned the intentional spill as “an unconscionable act of eco-terrorism.”

The organization said in a statement, “This dumping could destroy the gulf for decades. It takes approximately 200 years for ocean currents to completely replace the waters of the Persian Gulf. The gulf is a valuable source of food for the people of the region.”

Richard S. Golob, publisher of Golob’s Oil Pollution Bulletin, said the oil industry in the gulf is ill-prepared to deal with a spill of this size.

All contingency plans in the region are based on worst-case accidental spills, not a massive intentional release, he said.

“They will continue to lose oil for an extraordinary period,” Golob said.

While the gulf spill threatens to dwarf the Exxon Valdez disaster in size, its impact may be less dramatic because the waters and shores of the Persian Gulf are hardly as pristine as was Prince William Sound, according to Eric Anderson, senior scientist with Applied Science Associates in Narragansett, R.I.

Anderson, whose consulting firm is preparing an oil-spill contingency plan for the United Arab Emirates, said the gulf is home to an operating shrimp fishery and a variety of wading birds, shore birds, marine turtles and migratory waterfowl.

Wildlife at risk include the dugong, an endangered marine mammal and close relative of the Florida manatee; sperm, humpback and other species of whales; four species of threatened and endangered sea turtles; dolphins; the endangered mugger crocodile; shrimp; anchovies and mackerel, environmental activists said. Also threatened are marshes, sea grasses and coral reefs along the Saudi coast, they said.

Broder reported from Washington and Dolan from Los Angeles. Times staff writer James Gerstenzang in Washington contributed to this report.

WORRIES OVER GULF OIL SPILLS

Reports that Iraqis are spilling oil into the gulf raise strategic and ecological concerns. Among the worries:

Spills could foul amphibious assaults, interfering with military strategies that include landings behind front lines.

The gulf is considered to have a fragile ecosystem that could suffer permanent damage.

A significant spill could threaten the region’s desalination plants, which provide more than half of its drinking water.

It could cripple power plants, factories and commercial fishing.

There are fears the oil will be set afire. Thick smoke could interfere with aerial attacks and could create longterm ecological damage through lowered temperatures.