Israel’s Worst-Ever Oil Spill Could Damage Environment for Years
Ecologists said on Wednesday it could take years to clean up a massive oil spill that flooded an Israeli nature reserve with up to five million liters of crude and threatened to spread to the Red Sea shore and neighboring Jordan.
A breached pipeline started spewing oil into Evrona desert reserve – famed for its rare deer and douma palms – a week ago, causing what experts called the worst spill in Israel’s 66-year history.
Clean-up teams have started sucking up the slick and have dug pools and erected barriers to stop it spreading further. But they warned that any rainfall could swell the black streams and overwhelm their defenses.
After the clean-up, experts would still have to deal with the damage caused to the fragile environment, they added.
“How exactly do you take care of a deer that is running and limping because of the oil? … How do you clean the vegetation? This is very complicated business,” Roey Talbi, an ecologist with Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, told Army Radio.
“We don’t have experience with something of this scale. Clean-up could take months, it could take years,” said Tali Tenenbaum, a spokeswoman for the Nature and Parks Authority.
The breach occurred during maintenance on the pipeline between the city of Eilat on the Red Sea and Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast, about 18 km (12 miles) north of Eilat, near the border with Jordan.
Between 3 and 5 million liters of oil leaked, of which about 2 million have since been drained with suction equipment, said the Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Company which owns the line. Some 20,000 tons of contaminated earth has been removed.
EAPC, a state-run company, is funding the clean-up and is considering bringing in foreign experts to help with rehabilitation, a spokesman said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO