Washington -- The United States is continuing its emergency efforts to control an oil spill off Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, an official with the U.S. Coast Guard announced.
Ed Stanton, senior member of the Coast Guard's 10-person pollution response National Strike Force sent to the island chain, said his crew pumped between 5,000 and 10,000 gallons of oil from two tanks aboard the grounded tanker Jessica and into a barge January 22. The tanker is spilling oil into waters off San Cristobal Island. San Cristobal is one of the 60 named islands in the chain, located about 1,000 kilometers from Ecuador's mainland.
The crew has concluded from inspecting other tanks on the ship that the amount of oil remaining aboard the Jessica may be considerably less than the 120,000 gallons previously reported, the Coast Guard said in a January 22 statement.
However, Stanton described the pumping operation as extremely difficult. "Waves were breaking over parts of the ship as the crews worked and by the time we stopped, the ship's starboard list had increased from 40 to 60 degrees. The tanker is badly damaged and remains very unstable," he said.
Stanton said his crew could not resume pumping until the ship was stabilized. The Coast Guard said Ecuadoran authorities were taking steps to salvage or improve the stability of the vessel, which ran aground near San Cristobal January 16 and several days later began leaking oil from a burst pipe on board into the Islands' ecologically sensitive waters.
Also, a Coast Guard spokesman in Washington said January 23 that his agency was sending more members of its pollution-response strike force to the Islands "to help with communications" on efforts to contain the oil spill. One team member was carrying a satellite phone to relay information back to Coast Guard headquarters in the United States, the spokesman said. These strike force members were scheduled to arrive on the scene January 24, the spokesman added.
Meanwhile, Charlie Henry, a scientific support coordinator from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been assisting Ecuadoran environmental authorities on plans to control, recover, and clean up oil that has already spilled into the water. NOAA's scientific coordinators evaluate risks to wildlife, forecast the drift and effect of spilled oil, and develop beach survey procedures.
The U.S. action came as Ecuador declared a national emergency in the Galapagos Islands because of the spill, which threatens some of the world's rarest sea animals and birds. U.S. officials say that while this spill of about 150,000 gallons of oil is much smaller than the Exxon Valdez supertanker's 1989 spill of 11 million gallons of oil in Alaskan waters, the unique ecology of the Galapagos makes it particularly vulnerable in the event of accidents of this type.
The Galapagos National Park protects unique animal species and their natural habitat, where they have evolved for thousands of years. British naturalist Charles Darwin's observations of life on the Islands in 1835 helped develop his theories on natural selection.
(The Washington File is a product of the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)