Authorities in China say one of the country's worst oil spills has been contained before any of the oil could reach international waters.
Dai Yulin, the deputy mayor of Dalian port in northeast China, said Monday that more than 8,000 fishing boats helped to keep the 435-square-kilometer slick from reaching the open sea.
The official Xinhua news agency quoted him saying there still remained the "arduous" job of cleaning up the oil. An estimated 1,500 tons of crude oil spilled into the Yellow Sea when two pipelines exploded at the port on July 16.
The city's website said oil had been successfully removed from a 50-square-kilometer area of the sea. But Mayor Li Wancai was quoted saying urgent work was still required to clean up beaches to prevent oil from washing back into the sea.
The explosions at an oil terminal near Dalian set off a fire that raged for 15 hours and took 2,000 firefighters to extinguish.
The accident has halted work at the depot run by the China National Petroleum Corporation, China's largest oil company.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and AFP.
