YOKOHAMA, Japan
In Japan's worst oil spill, a supertanker gashed its hull in Tokyo Bay's shallow waters yesterday and dumped nearly 15 million litres of light crude near the country's busiest port.
As the spreading slick, almost six kilometres wide, began to reach shore early today in the heavily populated areas of Yokohama and Kawasaki, Japan launched a full-scale cleanup operation involving more than 300 ships.
Thirteen children and two adults were sickened by fumes and taken to hospital.
The all-out effort follows severe criticism from Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and others about the slow start to cleanup efforts after an oil spill in January from a Russian tanker on the west coast of Japan.
``The most important thing for us to do now is to limit the extent of the spill,'' said Shigehiro Sakamoto, head of the cleanup task force. ``We are putting all of our resources into that.''
Mr. Hashimoto declared the spill a national disaster and asked the police, coast guard, local governments and the Japanese and U.S. armed forces to help in the cleanup.
In yesterday morning's accident, the 147,012-tonne Panamanian- registered, Japanese-operated Diamond Grace struck a reef off Yokohama, Japan's busiest port, rupturing at least two of its crude-oil tanks. The leaking stopped 1-1/2 hours after the accident, and the tanker moved to nearby Kawasaki to be emptied of the rest of its shipment.
Officials said there was no immediate explanation of why such a huge ship hit a clearly marked maritime hazard in one of Japan's busiest waterways, especially with an experienced harbour pilot aboard.
Fishermen also wondered how the navigators of such a huge vessel could have misjudged the well-known contours of the crowded bay.
``This area of the bay is very crowded with ships . . . so the tanker might have been trying to move out of the way of another ship when it ran aground,'' said Anguri Kamoshita, captain of a fishing boat.
The Diamond Grace and its crew of 25 had been en route to a refinery in Kawasaki from the United Arab Emirates. It was carrying 286 million litres of light crude.
The single-hull tanker, built in 1994, was chartered by Mitsubishi Oil and operated by a subsidiary of Japan's largest shipping company, Nippon Yusen K.K.
Many recently built tankers have double hulls, meant to reduce the chances of an oil spill in an accident, and such double hulls have been required on all ships built since 1996.
As dozens of ships began to clean up the spill and slow the oil's advance toward coastal fish stocks, workers spread absorbent mats on the slick or scooped it up with barrels, buckets and ladles. Helicopters sprayed dissolving agents on it.
The spill was small in comparison with the world's largest oil spills, which range from 110 million litres to 300 million litres (when the tanker Castillo de Bellvar hemorrhaged northwest of Cape Town in 1983), according to Golob's Oil Pollution Bulletin in Cambridge, Mass.
It also was only a fraction of the 41.6 million litres dumped by the Exxon Valdez off Alaska in 1989. But it was nearly twice that of Japan's previous worst spill - in 1974, when 7.5 million litres poured from a storage tank in the southwest.
It also was the second major oil accident this year in Japan. In January, a Russian tanker split and sank in the Sea of Japan, spilling 4.5 million litres of fuel oil and fouling hundreds of kilometres of shoreline.
The light crude from yesterday's spill probably will be easier to clean up than the thicker crude that fouled Alaska's coast.
``There's going to be more of it that will evaporate . . . but still, when you've got that quantity of even light crude, there's going to be significant beach impact,'' said Steve Provant, a U.S. expert who helped oversee the Valdez cleanup for Alaska.
As long as all the crude is removed from shore, Tokyo Bay probably will not suffer from the tar balls and asphalt that formed on Alaska beaches, Mr. Provant said.
Early concerns yesterday were over the possibility of fire. Coast guard boats circled the hobbled tanker, warning fishing boats against using cigarette lighters or matches. Coast guard helicopters hovered overhead. The threat of fire abated by nightfall as the fumes became less potent.
It was not clear how the slick would affect life in Tokyo and neighbouring Chiba, home to nearly 18 million people.
The greatest immediate threat seemed to be to the bay's fishing grounds. Yokohama is heavily industrialized, and oil storage complexes dot the coast. Towns that depend on the bay's fish, which help feed Japan's largest metropolitan area, ring the bay as well.
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