The tanker, sailing under the Cypriot flag, was carrying 325,000 barrels of oil from Venezuela. Divers reportedly found a 6 1/2-foot by 1 1/2-foot gash in the hull of the Athos. The U.S. Coast Guard said it is not clear yet what caused the hole.

“It may have a devastating impact on the marshes just below Philadelphia,” Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, told the Reuters news agency.

The Philadelphia area along the Delaware is a center for oil refineries. About 42 million gallons of oil are unloaded here every day.

On November 27, a plume of sludge extended 20 miles from the refinery area—near the Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, a nature preserve next to the Philadelphia airport—up the river to the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge north of downtown Philadelphia. Dead birds and snapping turtles have already washed up on shore along the route of the spill.

A stench hangs over the riverbank in Paulsboro. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the sludge on the river appeared to be as thick as asphalt.

In fact, the Citgo refinery specializes in the production of asphalt, and much of the oil shipped there has already been processed into a thicker grade of crude.

“This stuff accumulates,” Mary van Rossum, a representative of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, told the Inquirer. “You are introducing toxins with every spill, and that stuff starts to build up and impact water quality.”

This is the third major spill in the last 15 years in the Delaware near Philadelphia.

Van Rossum said that the spill might not have happened if the Athos were a double-hulled ship. One of the reforms adopted after the Exxon-Valdez 11 million gallon oil spill in Alaska in 1998 was to bar single-hulled oil tankers—like the Exxon-Valdez and the Athos I—from U.S. waters. But this change is not slated to go into effect until 2011.

For now, the U.S. Coast Guard has closed a 10-mile shipping lane from Philadelphia south along the river. This covers a number of refineries and many of the docks where food and merchandise is unloaded in the city. Ships scheduled to dock in the area have to queue up for now and wait to unload.

Government officials estimate it will take at least two to three months to clean up the spill.  
 
 
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