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A
pipeline breach near the Israel-Jordan border has flooded a nature reserve in
what authorities call one of Israel’s worst environmental disasters, causing
large amounts of potentially poisonous gas to be released near Aqaba, raising
health concerns.
The Eilat-Ashkelon crude oil pipeline near
the Evrona reserve in the south of Israel accidentally ruptured Wednesday night
spewing a river of oil across the desert. Israeli environment officials predict
that the clean-up effort could take years.
“The
full scope of the incident is still not clear to us, but it is certainly a
matter of millions of liters of crude oil, which is dangerous both to animals
and to the nature reserve itself," Environment Ministry
representative Guy Samet was quoted as saying in Globes, as Israeli financial
news daily.
Samet
has said that an estimated 4.3 mile-oil stream is flowing through the reserve,
which is home to a large gazelle population and the world’s northernmost doum
palms, a rare type of branching palm tree.
"This
is one of the State of Israel's gravest pollution events,"
Samet told Israel Radio on Thursday.
A
spokesman for the Eilat Asheklon Pipeline Company (EAPC), Ronen Moshe, said
that the spill occurred in a new section of the pipeline. The breach occurred
during prep work for the construction of an international airport in Timna, in
southern Israel, according to Haaretz. The reasons for the spill are being
investigated.
“There
are dozens of people in the field taking care of the aftermath,”
Moshe said Wednesday night, adding that the spill had not affected supply.
EAPC
workers were joined by Israeli firefighters and rescue forces who worked to
contain the spill, stopping the oil short of the Jordanian border. Route 90,
the main road to Eilat, was temporarily closed pending emergency work. The team
was reportedly able to curtail the oil flow after several hours.
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Though
the Jordanian side of the border remained unscathed, Jordanian officials have
said that over eighty Aqaba residents have sought medical treatment for respiratory
problems following the release of large amounts of hydrogen sulfide into the
air, according to Haaretz. However, officials said that the residents’ health
problems were not serious.
The 153-mile pipeline which
links Asheklon, a southern port city, to the Mediterranean coast, was opened in
the 1960s to facilitate transport of Iranian oil to Europe, but has primarily
been used to move oil within Israel since the deterioration of Israeli-Iranian
relations after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
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