South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun yesterday visited coastal regions hit by a massive oil spill as his government declared them special disaster areas, clearing the way for state assistance to the stricken shore.
Crude oil from a tanker damaged on Friday has been washing ashore onto beaches on the country's western coast, wreaking havoc on fishing and seafood farm industries in six cities and counties located about 150 km southwest of Seoul.
Roh instructed officials to make efforts to quickly recover from the disaster and assist residents over the compensation, presidential spokesman Cheon Ho-seon quoted Roh as saying at a Cabinet meeting.
The government's move for declaring the disaster areas is aimed at "easing the pains of regions and fishermen affected by the damage, and to quickly contain the contamination," the Government Administration and Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement.
The designation enables the central government to give financial aid to the local government to cover the cost of the clean-up, medical aid, tax cuts to residents and allow them to delay loan payments to banks, according to the ministry.
Thousands of people - including police and military personnel - were working in the spill areas to clean up after the accident, which sent 66,000 barrels of crude oil gushing into the ocean.
"We will make utmost efforts to ensure that the clean-up operation ends quickly," Government Administration and Home Affairs Minister Park Myung-jae said in a televized announcement.
Meanwhile, South Korea's Foreign Ministry has set up a task force to draw international cooperation in cleaning up the ecological disaster, said Cheon.
The exact damage figure was still not known, but was expected to be enormous given that the spill blackened most of beaches in the area and severely harmed the ecosystem.
As of Monday, about 2,560 hectares of aquatic seafood farms had been either destroyed or severely damaged, while dead oil-coated birds and fish started appearing on beaches.
About 690 metric tons (760 tons) of oil had been collected by yesterday, meaning that less than 10 percent of the total spill was retrieved.
An insurance company for the Hong Kong-registered supertanker Hubei Spirit and the International Oil Pollution Compensation Funds, an intergovernmental organization that South Korea participates in, will pay the bulk of the compensation, said Lee Sang-ho, a spokesman at the state-run Marine Pollution Response Corp in Seoul.
The insurance company can later request that the owner of the barge - Samsung Co - pay for damages following a court hearing to determine which ship was responsible for the accident, Lee said.
Source: China Daily/Agencies
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