World

Spill Ship's Crew Busted

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 22, 2001 / 8:46 AM EST / CBS

The captain and crew of a tanker that spilled at least 185,000 gallons of diesel into this fragile marine environment have been arrested, officials said Wednesday.

Capt. Tarquino Arevalo and his 13 crewmen were detained in Puerto Baquerizo on San Cristobal Island, Ecuadorean merchant marine Vice Adm. Gonzalo Vega said.

"I have requested penalties of prison for the vessel's captain and for the company (owners)," said Ecuadorean Environment Minister Rodolfo Rendon.

Formal charges have yet to be filed. Authorities said convictions on charges of negligence and crimes against the environment could carry prison sentences of up to two to four years.

The tanker Jessica, which started leaking fuel three days after it ran aground Jan. 16 off San Cristobal Island, has spilled some 170,000 gallons of diesel.

Capt. Ramiro Morejon, chief of control and marine monitoring for Galapagos National Park, said the ship ran aground because a signal buoy had been mistaken for a lighthouse.

An international team of recovery workers had stemmed the leak and unloaded about 50,000 gallons from the ship.

But an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 gallons of additional fuel was spilled late Tuesday, apparently after pounding surf caused new breaks in the hull of the tanker Jessica.

How much of an environmental setback the additional spill represented is not yet clear.

"We have taken all precautions to confront this situation," said Eliecer Cruz, director of the Galapagos National Park. "We have scattered dispersants in the zone and we have established a perimiter of floating containment buoys to lessen the environmental impact."

Slicks from last week's diesel spill have spread to fill an area bigger than Los Angeles.

Earlier Tuesday, it had appeared that nature was providing a helping hand for the islands — an ecosystem populated by species found nowhere else in the world and an inspiration for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Rendon said that fortuitous winds and strong currents had shifted the direction of the spilled diesel to the northwest, where there are no major islands.

The Galapagos, 600 miles west of the Ecuadorean mainland, is that country's main tourist attraction.

The spill here has taken a toll on the chain's unique wildlife.

Oil reached Santa Fe Island, 37 miles west of San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the Galapagos archipelago and home to large colonies of sea lions and marine iguanas. Rendon said one pelican had died and that the fuel had harmed some 40 other animals, including sea lions, seagulls, blue-footed boobies and albatrosses, which had been rescued and cleaned.

Robert Bensted-Smith, director of the Charles Darwin Research Station, says long-term damage to the environment and wildlife is still being assessed.

He adds that in addition to strong currents pushing the fuel out to sea, strong sunshine has evaporated some of the oil. But he says there is evidence that an unetermined quantity of sea urchins and seaweed have died on San Cristobal.

One long-term threat is that the escaped fuel could sink to the ocean floor, destroying algae that is vital to the food chain. That could threaten marine iguanas, sharks, birds that feed off fish and other species.