Oil Seeping From Sunken Barge Leaves Tar on Caribbean Beaches

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico —  An estimated 500,000 gallons of oil escaping from a sunken tank barge has spread across 300 miles of the Caribbean and is fouling beaches of Puerto Rico, St. Kitts, St. Thomas, St. Croix and other islands, the U.S. Coast Guard said Sunday.

The oil is from the Trinidad-registered barge Vesta Bella, which sank March 6 in nearly 2,000 feet of water about 13 miles off St. Kitts.

Since then, most of the vessel’s load of bunker oil, a marine fuel, has escaped to the surface of the warm Caribbean waters.

More than 500 cleanup workers, including Coast Guard personnel, private contractors and government employees, are using small shovels and garbage bags to pick up tar balls from the island beaches.

“This isn’t an Exxon Valdez kind of spill where you had waves of oil washing up on the beach,” said Coast Guard spokesman Glenn Rosenholm. “We’re seeing small tar balls here and there, that are mostly the size of a nickel.”

The U.S. Coast Guard was asked to assist in containing the spill after efforts by French and Dutch navy ships unsuccessfully sprayed chemical dispersants on the oil.

Unlike the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill, in which 11 million gallons of thick crude oil blackened beaches and rocks of Alaska’s coastline, much of the bunker fuel evaporated soon after it reached the surface, Rosenholm said.