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  Yahoo News 21 Apr 07
Vietnam oil spill mystery plot thickens
by Frank Zeller

Yahoo News 20 Mar 07
Mystery oil slick spreads to Vietnam's far south

Yahoo News 3 Feb 07
Mystery ship suspected in oil spill off Vietnam

PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
Oil Spill Blackens Central Vietnam Tourist Beaches

Yahoo News 1 Feb 07
Oil spill fouls Vietnam's China Beach

Yahoo News 1 Feb 07
Oil spill hits Vietnam's central coast

HANOI, Vietnam - An oil spill from an unidentified source has hit Vietnam's central coast, blackening popular resort beaches as thousands of local people help with the cleanup, officials said Thursday.

Authorities are investigating the source of the spill that reached the coast Tuesday night in Quang Nam province, said Nguyen Ngoc Dung, director of the provincial Natural Resources and Environment Department.

"Oil is everywhere at sea," he said. "In some areas it's as far as 12 miles."

The spill has affected beaches along the coast in the ancient town of Hoi An, a UNESCO recognized site, Dung said. Tourists were kept out of the sea while employees at the Palm Garden Resort in Hoi An worked to clean up blobs of thick oil that left a trail of dead fish, said Huynh The Nhien, a hotel manager.

Thousands of local people were mobilized to help with the cleanup elsewhere. The spill has also affected some beaches in neighboring Danang City, said Nguyen Dieu, director of the city's environmental agency.


PlanetArk 2 Feb 07
Oil Spill Blackens Central Vietnam Tourist Beaches

VIETNAM: February 2, 2007 HANOI - An oil spill has blackened some of central Vietnam's most popular beach resorts, but the cause is not yet known, government officials said on Thursday.

They said residents were helping clean up the oil, which was found along a 10-km (6-mile) stretch of coastline near the ancient town of Hoi An, a popular tourist spot recognised as a UNESCO heritage site.

"We have not identified the source and as far as we know the investigation is ongoing," an official at the search and rescue centre said by telephone from the nearby city of Danang.

Newspaper reports quoted Le Minh Anh, deputy head of the Quang Nam province People's Committee, as saying an Indonesian vessel taking a barge with timber cargo to China got stuck in waters near Cu Lao Cham island, off Hoi An, on Jan. 9. He said the barge had a crack and was leaking oil.

Anh said the vessel has been detained under Vietnamese law, which allows for a vessel to be held pending compensation from the owner.

Yahoo News 1 Feb 07
Oil spill fouls Vietnam's China Beach

HANOI (AFP) - An oil spill has fouled Vietnam's famed China Beach and the coastline near the world heritage-listed river port of Hoi An, officials said as they searched for the cause of the pollution.

Clumps of oil mixed with sand have marred a 20-kilometre (12-mile) stretch of beachfront in Vietnam's central-coast resort area since Tuesday, and hundreds of residents have helped clear up the mess, said local officials.

The amount of oil was larger than after similar spills in recent years but "not disastrous," said Victoria Hoi An Resort manager Claude Balland.

An Indonesian barge ran onto rocks more than three weeks ago and remains stranded about 40 kilometres offshore, but provincial officials said it remained unclear whether the oil came from this vessel or another source.

"We don't know the cause of the spill yet," said Nguyen Ngoc Dung, deputy head of the Quang Nam province natural resources and environment department. "Our top priority is to deal with the consequences and minimise the pollution."

Locals cleaning a beach near UNESCO world heritage site Hoi An had gathered and burnt five tons of the oily sand in one day, said a local newspaper. China Beach is the name US forces gave to the stretch of seafront between Danang City and Hoi An. It was a popular site for R and R, or rest and recreation, for American troops during the conflict.

Yahoo News 3 Feb 07
Mystery ship suspected in oil spill off Vietnam

HANOI (AFP) - Vietnamese authorities are still baffled by an oil spill that blackened its famed China Beach this week, but officials suspect a passing ship may have deliberately dumped the pollutant at sea.

A military helicopter has spotted more oil slicks, some several hundred square metres (thousands of square feet) in size, in waters northeast of Cu Lao Cham island, a nature reserve off the central- coast province of Quang Nam, said local media.

A passing oil tanker may have accidentally or deliberately released waste oil in the South China Sea, the regional director of a centre dealing with the spill, Tran Manh Hung, was quoted as saying by the Thanh Nien daily.

Authorities in the city of Hoi An, an ancient, world heritage-listed river port, have mobilised hundreds of people who collected 60 tons of oil mixed with sand in recent days, and clean-up efforts continue elsewhere on the coast.

In all, the spill has sullied about 125 kilometres (75 miles) of beachfront since Tuesday, leaving blobs of oil and sand along the coast including the 'China Beach' made famous as a rest and recreation spot for US wartime troops.

Some tourists in the resort area south of the central city of Danang have helped clean up the mess, and hundreds more have left the region.

Yahoo News 20 Mar 07
Mystery oil slick spreads to Vietnam's far south

An oil slick that first soiled Vietnam's central coast two months ago has spread to the country's far south, hitting fisheries and aquaculture, officials and state media said Tuesday.

Government officials from the environment, defence and foreign ministries and the state-run oil company held a meeting Monday to assess the cause of the pollution and how to deal with it, the Vietnam News Agency said.

Authorities have not determined whether the oil was discharged by a passing tanker or leaked from an offshore oil rig in the South China Sea. The blobs of oil that first appeared on Vietnam's central coast in late January, driving tourists off the famed China Beach, have now blackened beaches as far south as the resort of Vung Tau and the far-southern Ca Mau peninsula.

Thousands of volunteers have scraped hundreds of tons of oil mixed with sand off beaches and rocky seashores in recent weeks, while the slick has killed marine life and damaged coastal shrimp and clam farms.

"The source of the oil is still unknown, but local fishermen have reported catching marine products dirtied with oil," said a Tien Giang province environment department official. "We have sent teams of youth volunteers to the coastal Go Cong district to collect the oil."

The Vietnam News Agency said the National Search and Rescue Committee oversaw Monday's meeting, which agreed to send an expert team to Vung Tau to take samples and compare them with those taken elsewhere along the coast.

Yahoo News 21 Apr 07
Vietnam oil spill mystery plot thickens
by Frank Zeller

For three months crude oil spills have sullied beaches, mangroves and aquaculture farms along Vietnam's long coastline, but the government says the source of the pollution remains a mystery.

While soldiers and volunteers have scraped over 1,600 tons of congealed oil and sand off Vietnam's shores since late January, officials remain at a loss to explain whether the oil was dumped by a tanker or leaked from a platform.

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has said that Hanoi has asked for help from its South China Sea neighbours in finding the source of the slicks, while ruling out the country's own offshore wells as the origin.

The head of the National Search and Rescue Committee, Nguyen Son Ha, has said that a possible culprit was a leaking Chinese oil rig south of Hainan island that was damaged in a typhoon last year.

As the world marked Earth Day on Sunday, the mystery continued while the oil kept coming, threatening marine life and impacting coastal communities that rely on tourism, fishing, and shrimp and clam farms.

This week, Vietnam's seaside resort of Nha Trang was hit by another mystery slick, scaring tourists off its usually white beaches and hitting lobster breeders in neighbouring Ninh Thuan province.

The government has released no estimates of the economic damage to the marine sector of a country that has a 3,200-kilometre (2,000-mile) coastline, amid numerous reports of badly-hit oceanside industries.

In the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre, clam farmers have suffered an "immediate consequence of this disaster," said Keith Symington, regional marine programme coordinator of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

The farms, which were working toward being eco-certified under a model programme with the communist government and the WWF, "are now devastated, economically and environmentally, by oil contamination," he said.

The oil slicks first blackened Vietnam's central coast in late January, hitting the famed "China Beach" -- a former American military rest and recreation spot during the Vietnam war -- and the seashore around the historic port of Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

At first, many shrugged off the black blobs as one of the smaller spills that have become a regular occurrence along one of the world's busiest shipping lanes and also a major oil and gas producing region.

But officials soon realised this year was worse, as carpets of oil started washing up along an 800-kilometre stretch of coast. Since then, the oil slicks have spread to the far southern Ca Mau peninsula and Con Dau island, a remote nature reserve famed for its turtles where volunteers mopped up nearly 40 tonnes of oily sand in mid-March.

The state-run Vietnam National Oil and Gas Group has said the oil did not match that from its own White Tiger and Dragon fields. Some experts have suggested the oil may have seeped naturally from cracks in the seafloor, or that oil from older spills may have been churned up by an oceanographic phenomenon called upwelling.

One marine environment expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, said monsoonal patterns supported the theory that some slicks had been blown from near China's Hainan island toward central Vietnam.

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) recently named as a likely source in Vietnam's state-controlled Tuoi Tre newspaper, refused to comment when contacted by AFP in Beijing.

Still, there is hope Vietnam is edging closer to an answer.

This week, its environment ministry asked Japan for help in detecting the source of the oil spill, a search that may include sophisticated satellite technology that Vietnam lacks. In future, said the WWF's Symington, Vietnam needed to step up its ability to detect, respond to and prevent oil spills.

"The growing amount of international traffic, together with the expanding marine petroleum economy inside Vietnam, point to the same conclusion," he said. "More efforts are needed to ensure the protection of Vietnam's marine environment and the livelihoods of millions of people whose lives depend on a healthy ocean environment."
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