Thousands of fishermen, soldiers and volunteers struggled Sunday to clean up an oil spill that has caused an environmental disaster in South Korea. It has blackened once-scenic beaches, coated birds and oysters in sludge and driven away tourists with its stomach-churning stench.But the 7,000 people mobilized were too few to clean up the oil slick, which has been washing up since Saturday along a 12-mile-long shoreline of the nation's west coast. Strong tides, which dragged the sludge out to sea before pushing it ashore again, hampered the cleanup operations by villagers, who complained of headaches and nausea from the stench.
The oil spill occurred Friday, when the steel wire linking a tugboat to a barge carrying a crane snapped in stormy seas. The barge lurched toward the Hebei Spirit, a Hong Kong-registered oil tanker, which was at anchor, and punched three holes into its hull.
The spill came a week after the South Korean port town of Yosu won the right to be the host in 2012 for an international event called Expo. Bidding for the event, South Korea championed the theme of "the living ocean and coast," a slogan it hoped would bolster environmental awareness in Asia.
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