Unalaska Spill Approaches 335K Gallons - Wildlife Toll Rising Sharply

[hatrack]

"A local crab-fishing season has been canceled and the estimated number of animals killed or injured by oil has sharply increased as a rare break in rough Bering Sea weather allows officials to gain a better sense of the damage from a large spill in the Aleutian Islands. More than 355,000 gallons of fuel oil are now thought to have spilled from the freighter Selendang Ayu, which ran aground and split in two just off Unalaska Island on Dec. 8.

The island is home to the nation's largest commercial fishing port by volume, and the second-largest by value of annual catch, said Frank Kelty, resource analyst and former mayor of the city of Unalaska, which sits along the port, Dutch Harbor. Unalaska's big commercial operations, which fish at some distance from the port, should be relatively unaffected by the cancellation of the local tanner crab season, which was to have begun on Jan. 15. But small-boat fishermen will be badly hurt, Mr. Kelty said, losing nearly $500,000 in revenue to the oil contamination that has deprived them of the area's biggest catch at this time of year.

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Biologists have so far counted 109 bird carcasses and more than 600 birds coated with oil in the area around the wreck. But they expect that many more birds, perhaps thousands, have been killed. "That's just a small inkling of what's actually out there," Petty Officer Francis said of the number counted. "It's a very large area, and the only way to get an accurate number is to walk all of the beach, and that won't happen until the spring."

And by then, she said, the carcasses will most likely have been devoured by the foxes and ravens that have been scavenging the area in large numbers, picking at the dead birds and almost certainly ingesting oil themselves."

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/national/30alaska.html?oref=login

[orpupilofnature57]

1. "Dominion theocracy" in action!Shrubs plan no action. eom