By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Correspondent
BEIJING – All summer, we’ve watched the U.S. news coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from our Beijing perch.
When successive attempts to cap the oil failed early on, some reporters joked that it would be months before anyone would get a story from Beijing onto any American news broadcasts unless China sprouted its own leak.
Reuters
A worker cleans up oil at the oil spill site near Dalian port, Liaoning province, China on Friday.
In fact, in a brilliant example of satire, one enterprising journalist tried to imagine a scenario in which the BP oil spill happened in China. (In Pictures: Would BP’s CEO Have Been Executed In China?)? ?
Well, that scenario has almost come true – although with significant differences.
Oil began to leak into the Yellow Sea last Friday, after a pipe carrying crude oil from a Liberian ship to a storage tank blew up, setting off a second explosion at a smaller pipeline at Dalian Xingang oil port in the northeastern province of Liaoning.?
Both pipelines are owned by Asia’s biggest oil and gas producer and supplier by volume, the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).
Some 2,000 firefighters spent at least 15 hours battling the fire all night. But even though they were able to contain the spill relatively soon, the incident unleashed a massive oil slick. With the aid of tides and strong winds, the slick quickly doubled in size, spreading to an area covering 165 square miles. Small compared to the Gulf oil spill, but still the largest disaster of its kind in China in recent memory.
Trying to contain the impact
Hundreds of fishing boats, specialized cleaning vessels, volunteers, even “oil-eating” bacteria have been mobilized to reduce the impact of the spill.
But reports from the ground say the efforts have been hampered by lack of equipment and expertise. In some instances, volunteers wear nothing but rubber gloves and rubber boots and use their hands to scoop out the oil or cloth to soak it up from the ocean. One firefighter drowned on Tuesday after a wave threw him into the water as he tried to clean a boat pump.
Environmentalists warn that two of Dalian’s critical industries, tourism and fish farming, have been hard hit.
Jiang He/ Greenpeace/ Handout
A clean-up worker swimming in the thick sludge of crude oil tries to rescue a struggling colleague in the Chinese port of Dalian, Liaoning province on Tuesday. The photo was released by the environmental group Greenpeace.
“In the areas worst affected, we’ve seen an oil slick as thick as 20 centimeters [almost 8 inches] in the water,” said Zhong Yu, a Greenpeace China campaigner who with five colleagues in Dalian has spent the past five days observing the clean-up efforts and researching the ecological damage. (The team has posted a series of dramatic photographs on their website, which msnbc.com’s PhotoBlog wrote about earlier in the week.)
Beaches at Dalian, one of the cleanest of China’s cities, were mostly closed after crude oil washed up on the shores. One local newspaper reported that oil had penetrated at least 11 inches into the sand at one beach.
“The most famous beach here, Jinshitan, used to have 150,000 visitors a day,” Zhong told NBC News during a phone interview from Dalian. “Obviously, now no one’s coming here.”?
In addition to the beaches, nature reserves, and tourist parks, Dalian’s aquaculture farms are also affected, Zhong added. More than 10,000 shellfish farms have been tainted with petroleum, and the price of local shellfish has dropped by 15 percent.
The clean-up will take years, she said. “This is long-term damage we’re seeing here.”
SLIDESHOW: China oil spill doubles in size
Minimal coverage?
Zhong and her Greenpeace colleagues have had complete access to the affected areas and have encountered no resistance during their research. However, the disaster hasn’t dominated the headlines in China (apart from the dramatic photo of two men, one appearing to be drowning, in the oil slick from three days ago). What coverage there is tends to focus on the repair of the pipelines and progress of the clean-up, but there has been minimal reporting on the extent of the environmental damage.
The government is known to be coy about how it manages its energy supplies while growing its economy at a blistering pace. It was quick to reject the tag as “world’s biggest energy consumer” by the International Energy Agency (IEA) earlier this week. The Chinese National Energy Administration suggested the IEA figures were not reliable, but another report – by BP no less – also ranks China as the number one consumer of energy now.?
