Saudis Losing Fight to Corral Huge Oil Slick

The battle against a massive oil slick in the Persian Gulf has become one of the latest casualties of war, with environmental officials admitting that they are not prepared to check much of its devastating progress southward along the Saudi coastline.

Saudi Arabia, already strapped for cash because of huge outlays for the war effort, has committed only a small fraction of the estimated $1 billion needed simply for initial containment and cleanup of the spill, according to diplomatic sources in the Saudi capital.

Also, organizational problems within the Saudi government delayed the start of cleanup operations, preventing the removal of a substantial amount of oil from the Gulf before it had washed up into environmentally sensitive fishing grounds and shore-bird breeding areas, the kingdom’s own environmental experts say.

The Saudi government has delayed hiring extra oil-skimming vessels because there is no money to bring them to the Gulf, and trenching operations to contain oil along the beaches have been postponed because bulldozers could not be acquired in the first critical days of the spill, the experts said.

“We’ve agonized every foot of this spill’s movement,” said David Olson, assistant to the director of Saudi Arabia’s Meteorology and Environmental Protection Administration (MEPA), which is overseeing the cleanup effort.

“There is not a single thing that could not have been done better,” he said.

For the first time in its recent history, Saudi Arabia has been placed in the position of seeking aid from international donors--of asking for money instead of writing checks.

“The till is dry. There’s no money in the cash register right now,” said a diplomat in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. “The Saudis are not deployed well bureaucratically to deal with a lack of money. They haven’t had to worry about that since the late ‘50s. So, for the first time, we’re stepping into a much larger debate than just the oil spill.”

Saudi Arabia is also in the position of defending, as one of the world’s major oil producers poised alongside the Persian Gulf, its response to an oil spill that is the largest in history--far larger than anything ever contemplated in the kingdom’s disaster planning scenarios.

“Nobody could have foreseen this kind of situation,” a U.S. Coast Guard official said. “If you told me three months ago that I would be over here participating in what is indeed the world’s largest oil spill, I would’ve told you you’re crazy.”

Diplomats and oil-spill experts say the kingdom successfully moved quickly to protect critical water desalination and hydroelectric plants along the coast but has not had enough resources left to prevent widespread damage to the environment--in some cases, they say, because the massive slick was not aggressively attacked at sea during the first few critical days before large quantities could begin washing ashore.

“They’re not doing enough, and the reason is they don’t have the money,” said a Western official monitoring the oil spill.

Estimates of the cost for protecting immediately threatened coastal facilities and doing some initial cleanup are about $1 billion. Final cleanup costs range upwards of $5 billion. But diplomatic sources say the kingdom so far has committed only what was within MEPA’s regular budget, about $10 million.

MEPA says it has located rubber protection booms around the world to help hold back the widening slick but has been unable to purchase large quantities of new booms because there is not enough money. Aircraft to fly over the spill and survey it were brought in only recently, in part thanks to four U.S. Coast Guard aircraft that were to arrive on loan over the weekend.

While several skimming vessels from Saudi Arabia’s oil company Aramco and a few others donated by foreign governments have been deployed in the Gulf to pump oil from the surface of the water, many more are needed, an MEPA official said. The Saudis attempted to contract for two Soviet vessels, but the deal fell apart when the Soviets demanded that the Saudis pay their fuel costs, the official said.

Bechtel Inc., tentatively hired as the major initial cleanup contractor, and two other smaller contractors have begun work on a massive containment and cleanup effort, at this point with no firm guarantee that Saudi Arabia will be able to pay all the bills, Olson said.

Environmental officials have their eye on a $9-billion pledge from the Japanese government to the Gulf, some of which they argue should be earmarked for the Gulf cleanup effort.

However, intense divisions reportedly have arisen within the Saudi government over disposition of foreign aid money, only some of which has arrived so far. With the prospect of having to borrow $3 billion from foreign banks to ease cash flow problems, many Saudis are arguing that settling the kingdom’s military debts must take a higher priority than cleaning up the Gulf.

While the overwhelming problem has been money, Saudi Arabia has also had to struggle to organize its resources and deploy them quickly to the most critical areas along the coast. MEPA took over the coordination of oil spills in the kingdom only three years ago, and it adopted an oil-spill response strategy only a little more than a week before the flood of crude oil was unleashed from Kuwait’s Sea Island terminal. The allies said it was a deliberate act by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

As a result, the agency was not prepared during the first few days to immediately procure some of the heavy equipment needed to combat the spill, according to environmental experts. For instance, they said, it took several days to get earthmoving equipment to beaches to dig trenches that would trap the oil and allow it to be removed before washing back out to sea.

Aircraft to fly over the spill and guide skimming equipment to the largest concentrations of oil also were delayed, they said.

“The oil spill plan was signed into law just before this, a matter of a week or so before the spill, and there was not time to fund it or develop an organizational structure,” Olson said. “Many agencies didn’t know exactly what they were supposed to do.”

A U.S. interagency response team composed of experts familiar with oil spills arrived within 72 hours after the spill’s first thrust into Saudi Arabia, and experts and equipment from Britain and Norway arrived shortly thereafter.

Already, Aramco had deployed initial protective equipment around the most critical coastal oil-producing and hydroelectric facilities in Safaniya and Tanajib, and the giant industrial city of Jubayl farther south, site of the world’s largest water desalination plant, was protected within a week, Saudi officials say.

Shortly after the arrival of the international advisers, the kingdom came out with a plan identifying the most critical coastal facilities needing protection, including some wildlife habitat areas, and plans were developed to guard them from the advancing spill.

“Every response that has been possible to make nationally and internationally has been made,” Olson said. “Every one of Aramco’s northern vital facilities had some level of protection within three days, and within a week, all of their assets were deployed. So they moved very rapidly, and very effectively, and then they went about shopping the international market for additional equipment.”

One of the problems, diplomatic sources say, is that after a flood of pledges of free international assistance during the first week of the spill, additional offers of oil booms and skimming vessels came with the expectation that the Saudis would pay for them--and the arrival of new equipment slowed drastically.

As large quantities of oil began washing up on beaches at Safaniya and the habitat-rich island of Abu Ali, poisoning fish-breeding grounds and leaving hundreds of oil-soaked birds dead, some officials began wondering if Saudi Arabia should have devoted more resources very early toward combating the slick at sea, skimming away oil from the surface before it could move south.

The spill was such that it would have been much easier to remove the oil before it weathered and mixed with the sea water, a Coast Guard official said. “The early oil was so fresh it was reusable. It could’ve been pumped,” Olson said.

With more money early on, he said, “they would have fought better in certain areas, there would’ve been areas that would have been saved.”

Digging more trenches to trap oil on northern beaches could have stopped much of the oil from moving farther south, other experts said.

“There’s definitely more oil in the water than there would’ve been if trenches would’ve been dug further up the coast--if as soon as it was as far south (of the Kuwaiti war zone) to be safe, they would’ve burned it. There’s all those measures that weren’t taken,” said one analyst. “Which means that all those facilities down the coast are more at risk than they would have been.”

However, few experts have said that Saudi Arabia, faced with an unpredictable environmental catastrophe in the midst of its first war, could have reacted substantially differently.

For one thing, a U.S. Coast Guard official said, it is not necessarily fair to criticize the kingdom for rushing to protect its industrial facilities and neglecting cleanup of the spill itself, because early wind projections showed that it would threaten coastal facilities much more quickly than has proven to be the case.

Also, the kingdom was faced with combating a spill it couldn’t begin to fully see or measure because the greater part of it lay in enemy territory.