Oil Clean-up

Today H-k and I joined nearly 32,000 other people from around Korea to help clean up the oil that has covered nearly 170 kilometers of Korea's west coast since a Hong Kong oil tanker and a Korean barge collided 8 kilometers from shore last Thursday, dumping 10,500 tons of crude oil into the West Sea (known outside Korea as the Yellow Sea).

We left our town at 7:30 AM and traveled by bus with an environmental group to Taean County where we spent four hours mopping up oil from the rocky beach with absorbant cloths and scooping mounds of oil-covered oyster shells into burlap sacks for safe disposal. It was cold and windy, and the sky occasionally spat snow and sleet on us, so we had to wear bulky layers of clothing under our protective suits, giving us an amazing resemblance to the Marshmallow Man. They don't let you work for more than four hours at a time because the exposure to the fumes and chemicals is unhealthy and potentially dangerous.

I felt fine while I was working, but on the bus on the way home, both H-k and I had a headache and felt dizzy and a little nauseous. That passed once I got off the bus, ate some dinner, and took a shower. Now my arms hurt from scrubbing rocks and bagging shells, and my legs hurt from squating on the rocks. The beach we worked on was not the hardest hit among the beaches on Korea's west coast yet the progress was just so slow, even with all the people working. We'd clean one section of beach and look down and see more oil. This spill is devasting to the natural environment, which consists significantly of coastal mudflats and is an important habitat for migratory birds, and also the local fishing, marine farming, and tourist industries. It felt hopeless, but as H-k said, we have to start somewhere.