Several miles of beach on St. Simons Island, Georgia was fouled with oil as it spilled into the waters nearby earlier in the week. The remains of a cargo ship that overturned but is being dismantled on the Georgia coast continued to leak oil. Workers were trying to keep up with the spill clearing away thick swaths of sand that were darkened by the oil.
Nearly 70 workers were sent to the area and cleanup is expected to take days. The oil also found its way into marshlands around the island.
The freighter, a South Korean flagged ship – the Golden Ray, capsized nearly two years ago. Salvagers have been cutting it up to remove it for months. Around 320,000 gallons of oil had been drained from the fuel tanks of the vessel before the salvage operation began. As the some of the final section was removed by crane, oil that had been collecting in the ballast tanks began gushing out of the section, according to a Coast Guard spokesman.