LAPAZ (Philippines), Aug 16: Rescue workers battled on Wednesday to stop a huge oil spill from further polluting the central Philippine coastline as fishermen, smeared in the foul-smelling sludge, returned to shore with empty nets.

“It’s just like an abscess, a medical problem. If you don’t remove it, more tissues are destroyed,” Guimaras Governor Joaquin Carlos Nava told a news conference.

Fishing grounds, dive spots and a national marine reserve were contaminated and the livelihood of thousands of people threatened after a tanker carrying two million litres of bunker fuel sank off the coast of central Guimaras island on Friday.

The provincial government has declared the tropical resort island a disaster zone and officials have warned that the spill, the largest to afflict the Southeast Asian country, could take three years to clean with over 200kms of coastline affected.

Officials have estimated that about 200,000 litres of fuel seeped from the submerged tanker, chartered by the Philippine’s largest refiner Petron, producing a 20 nautical mile wide spill.

Experts from Britain are arriving tomorrow to see if oil still trapped on board can be removed without further leaks.

Some families moved away from the shores of Guimaras, about 470 kilometres south of Manila, as the industrial fuel washed up on beaches, staining sand and nearby trees.—Reuters