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  PlanetArk 28 Aug 06
Lebanese Oil Slick Perhaps not as Bad as Feared
Story by Gideon Long

BEIRUT - The impact on marine life of an oil slick off the Lebanese coast, caused by Israel's bombing of a power plant, might not be as devastating as had been feared, a Lebanese environmentalist group said on Friday.

Shellfish, fish larvae and baby turtles have been badly hit but larger fish have survived virtually unscathed, the group, Bahr Loubnan (Lebanon's Sea), said.

It said it was not trying to play down the impact of the slick, which it described as dire, but rather to inject a dose of realism into the debate over how to tackle it.

"This is not the Red Sea. We don't have corals here, we don't have sponges," said group member Mohamad al-Sarji, a professional scuba diver who led a team of divers in an assessment of the polluted Lebanese coastline this month.

"Even the fisheries are very limited in Lebanon -- the amount of fish found in the sea," he told Reuters. "The way this slick has been reported in the media does not reflect the accuracy of the situation."

The slick was caused by Israel's bombardment of a power plant in southern Lebanon last month during its war with Hizbollah guerrillas. It has spewed around 15,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil along a 140-km (87-mile) stretch of the coast.

Some environmentalists have said the oil could kill large fish and even dolphins, but Bahr Loubnan said that was unlikely. "People don't seem to want to look into the scientific aspects of this," said Manal Nader, a group member and director of the institute of the environment at Balamand University in northern Lebanon.

"The impact on fish larvae and immature fish is quite extensive because they live close to the shoreline, but big fish migrate to deeper waters where the oil is not mixing."

Sarji, whose scuba team inspected 10 sites between the southern port of Sidon and the northern city of Tripoli, said the impact on marine life would have been worse had the slick occurred in winter, when the eastern Mediterranean can be choppy.

"We've got around three months before storms start churning up the waters," he said. "It's essential we start cleaning it up as soon as we can."

Bahr Loubnan said it was safe to eat Lebanese fish. "Most people see sand covered in oil and assume the sea is ruined and the fish are not edible," Sarji said. "But the ministry of agriculture has been dissecting fish since the disaster and found no evidence of pollution."

He also said the Israeli blockade of Lebanon's coastline, imposed in mid-July at the start of the war and still in place, had had at least one positive side effect, even though it had made life tough for Lebanese fishermen.

"The sea has been protected from fishing for over a month now," he said. "When the blockade is eventually lifted and our fishermen can fish again, I'm confident they will find bigger and better fish than before."
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