An oil spill has been contained south of the country shortly after it reached the Karkheh River basin, but the response team managed to prevent the spill from polluting the large reservoir of Karkheh embankment dam, Shana news agency quoted a senior local official as saying on Monday.
A local diesel fuel transmission pipeline was damaged last week by an earthmover in a mountainous area on the border between Lorestan and Khuzestan provinces, said Hamid Goudarzi, governor of the city of Andimeshk, located north of Khouzestan Province.
“We can confirm that the oil spill had reached at some point to the Zal River (a right tributary of Karkheh River), but it’s been fully contained now,” Goudarzi stated. Earlier, an official from Lorestan’s provincial department of environment had said that the leak had reached the Zal River but the combat team had successfully diverted the spilled diesel oil and reinjected it into the main local pipeline.
The Karkheh Dam is on the Karkheh River in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, the closest city being Andimeshk to the east. It is 127 meters high and has a reservoir capacity of 5.9 billion cubic meters. The Karkheh Dam is designed to irrigate 320,000 hectares of land, produce 520 MW of hydro-electricity and prevent downstream floods.
