Coast Guard Official Sees Little Hope of Full Oil Spill Cleanup : Environment: There is confusion over reports of a second slick spotted by a pilot near Bubiyan Island. Schwarzkopf says an Iraqi terminal is leaking.

A U.S. Coast Guard official said Wednesday there is little hope of fully clearing a massive oil slick from the Persian Gulf, and there were reports that a second large slick has been spotted off the coast of Kuwait.

“Historically, we’ve only been able to cover 10% to 15% of any large spill, so there’s no way to conceive of picking up all the oil from this spill,” said Coast Guard Capt. Don Jensen, head of the U.S. Interagency Oil Spill Assistance Team dispatched here to help in the cleanup. “It may not even be worthwhile in this case. I think with the management of this spill we have to concentrate on protecting the high-priority areas” on the shore.

Accordingly, he said, the cleanup effort is focused on deflecting the spill from power, petrochemical and water desalination plants, whose intakes run the risk of sucking in the toxic crude if it moves too close to shore nearby. Efforts also are under way to safeguard some critical wildlife breeding areas, Jensen said.

There was some confusion over reports of a second slick. According to Saudi and American government officials, a U.S. military pilot flying over the Gulf Tuesday night spotted what appeared to be a large spill originating near Bubiyan Island, one of two disputed Kuwaiti islands near its border with Iraq.

“Our reports indicate that it originates just south of Bubiyan near the Shatt al Arab (waterway), which would put it close to many of Iraq’s oil facilities,” said a Saudi official, who asked not to be identified.

“This may mean that he’s done it again,” the official added, referring to President Saddam Hussein’s admission that Iraq deliberately opened crude oil taps at Kuwait’s Sea Island loading terminal south of Kuwait city and poured an estimated 7 million to 11 million barrels of oil into the Gulf.

Others, though, put the source of the new spill at the Mina al Bakr oil terminal in southern Iraq. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, said Wednesday that the Iraqi terminal has been leaking for several days since attacks on the facility by coalition forces.

Schwarzkopf said allied forces have attacked the majority of Iraq’s refined petroleum facilities.

“We didn’t want to destroy their oil industry, but we certainly wanted to make sure they didn’t have a lot of gasoline for their military vehicles,” he told reporters at a briefing in Riyadh.

Air Force Capt. Barclay Trehal, a photo interpreter with a reconnaissance unit, said still photographs brought back by U.S. planes in recent days show extensive pollution from a wide number of sources in the Gulf.

“It’s easily 100 miles by 30 or 40 miles and spreading,” he said Wednesday. “It’s being spread from various sources.”

Trehal said the photographs show that there are oil refineries burning around the Gulf and numerous drilling platforms are leaking. Trehal said he doesn’t know whether the leaks are the result of allied bombing or Iraqi sabotage.

“Oil derricks are leaking and you can see oil spewing into the Gulf,” he said.

U.S. military officials said they could not positively confirm the existence of a second large oil slick. A U.S. Coast Guard pilot who attempted to locate the spill by day on Wednesday could not probe far enough north into Kuwaiti territory, a military official said.

He cautioned that the original sighting Tuesday night had only been made with the assistance of night vision goggles.

“With the night goggles, they can do funny things, and we figure the best thing to do until we can confirm it is to just not talk about it,” he said.

Nonetheless, Saudi officials charting the course of the original spill plotted the location of a second slick extending south several miles from Bubiyan between Iran’s Nowruz oil field and Kuwait’s Al Ahmadi oil field, the source of the original spill at the Sea Island terminal eight miles offshore.

The pilot was not able to give any indication of how large the spill was, several officials stated, although one Saudi official studying the reports said, “It seems like it’s a big one.”

Schwarzkopf did not connect the apparent leak at Mina al Bakr to reports of a second spill, but the Iraqi oil facility “has been attacked for several reasons in the past,” he told reporters.

“To date, we’ve been watching that oil spill very carefully,” the general said. “Frankly, if it gets out of control, we’ll try and do exactly what we did with the other one if we have to.”

U.S. F-111s flew into Kuwait on Saturday night and bombed two pipe complexes feeding crude toward the Sea Island terminal, apparently shutting off the flow of oil into the gulf.

Schwarzkopf displayed photographs of the site on Wednesday, which no longer showed any indication of a continuing spill.

“Blue water--no more oil slick out there,” he said. “The United States military is very proud of any role we may have played in doing away with this ecological act of terrorism.”

The original spill moved south off the Saudi coast as far as Ras al Tanajib, touching shore in a few isolated locations, but it was not expected to reach the industrial city of Jubayl for at least three days.

Only about half a million barrels of the spill have moved south of the Kuwait border into Saudi Arabia, Saudi officials said.

An international task force assembled to control the spill met for the first time Wednesday. A preliminary assessment already has determined that it is too late to use chemical dispersants on the spill, which are usually valuable only in the first few days of a spill, when the oil is still relatively light, the Coast Guard’s Jensen said.

“I would say we are as confident as we can be,” said Nisar Tawfig, vice chairman of the Saudi Meteorology and Environmental Protection Agency.

Large rubber booms were being moved into place to protect these facilities, but high seas could overflow the booms and inundate the facilities, he admitted.

Control authorities will also skim the oil from the surface of the Gulf after determining where best to begin such operations to protect coastal facilities.

One phenomenon that has affected oil spills in the Persian Gulf is sandstorms, which tend to cause sand to settle on the surface of the oil and drive it more quickly toward the bottom, Jensen said. The relatively high winds of the past several days--nearly double normal levels for this time of year--also will help break up the spill and allow natural microbes in the water to help biodegrade it, he said.

However, the same process that is breaking up the spill also could make it more difficult to prevent crude from being drawn into desalination plant intakes on shore, Jensen admitted.

Contamination of the plants “is a possibility at this point, because of the way the oil is expected to go . . . it is a very high risk,” he said.

The desalination plant at Jubayl, the largest in the world, supplies about 60% of Saudi Arabia’s water and up to 90% of the water used in Riyadh.

Indications are that the spill already has begun to break into patches of its own accord. Monitoring officials say its southernmost section is forming into long ribbons, each about a kilometer wide and several kilometers long.