Big spill blackens Curacao preserve

KINGSTON, Jamaica – An extensive fuel spill has fouled a stretch of shoreline and oiled pink flamingos and other wildlife in a nature preserve in Curacao, conservationists and residents of the tiny Dutch Caribbean island said Monday.

The leader of a local environmental group said Monday that the spill of crude oil at Curacao’s Jan Kok preserve was from at least one storage tank owned by the Isla oil refinery, the largest business and employer on the southern Caribbean island best known for its diving opportunities and colorful capital of Willemstad. The island’s refinery is run by the state-owned oil company of Venezuela, only about 40 miles away.

“This is probably the biggest (environmental) disaster in Curacao,” said Peter van Leeuwen of the Stichting SMOC group. “The whole area of Jan Kok is black. The birds are black. The crabs are black. The plants are black. Everything is draped in oil.”

Curacao-based journalist Dick Drayer, who covers the Netherlands Antilles for Dutch television, estimated that the spill covers an area “of around 30 soccer fields.” He added that three distinct oil slicks are floating offshore and are “threatening the southern coast of Curacao.”

Photographs of Curacao’s southern Jan Kok area show a darkened coast and gobs of oil dripping off coastline rocks and mixing in the surf. Oil-smudged flamingos, crustaceans and lizards can be seen struggling on the wind-swept reserve of salt flats.

Van Leeuwen said the spill started threatening wildlife sometime last week but cleanup efforts by the company only recently got under way at the nature reserve, no more than 1,100 yards away from big tanks where Petroleos de Venezuela SA stores thousands of gallons of crude oil.

“A lot of time has gone by without any action. It’s been about one week before somebody at the company has done anything at all,” he said, adding that workmen are now excavating holes on Jan Kok’s beach to capture the spilled oil and mix it with sand and soil in order to cart it away.