Israel’s bombing of Iran’s oil infrastructure will have major long-term environmental repercussions, experts have warned, as monitors admitted they were struggling to keep track of the environmental disasters arising from the widening war.
Even as Iranians filled the streets to mark the appointment of a new supreme leader, the Shahran oil depot north-east of Tehran and the Shahr-e fuel depot to its south continued to burn on Monday, two days after they were bombed by Israeli warplanes.
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Iran’s environmental agency and the Iranian Red Crescent Society had warned Tehran residents to stay at home, warning the toxic chemicals spread by airstrikes on five fossil fuel installations around the city could lead to acid rain and damage the skin and lungs.
On Monday, the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said: “Damage to petroleum facilities in Iran risks contaminating food, water and air – hazards that can have severe health impacts especially on children, older people, and people with pre-existing medical conditions.”
Iran’s deputy health minister, Ali Jafarian, told Al Jazeera that the soil and water supplies around Tehran were already beginning to be contaminated by the fallout from the weekend’s explosions.
The black rain that fell across Tehran in the hours after the bombings was a mixture of soot and fine particulate matter from the explosions with rain from a storm that was already moving across the region, according to Dr Akshay Deoras, a research scientist at the University of Reading.
“The airstrikes on oil depots released soot, smoke, oil particles, sulphur compounds, and likely heavy metals and inorganic materials from the buildings, whilst a low‑pressure weather system, which typically sweeps across Iran and west Asia around this time of year, created conditions favourable for rainfall,” Deoras said.
“In terms of atmospheric chemistry, the oil fires produce sulphur and nitrogen compounds that could form acids if they dissolve in rainwater.
“The risks to human health come from inhaling or touching the smoke and particles. Immediate impacts can include headaches, irritation of the eyes and skin, and difficulty breathing – particularly for people with asthma, lung disease, older adults, young children, and those with disabilities.”
Tehranis reported difficulty breathing on Sunday, as well as headaches and burning sensations in their eyes and throats. But the acute effects of the black cloud that spread across the city could just be the beginning, according to Prof Andrea Sella, professor of inorganic chemistry at the University College London.
“The explosions will have exposed the local population to all manner of undesirable and toxic chemical species, a problem that is well known to accompany warfare,” he said, explaining that the crude oil will have contained a range of elements, including metals, that would “also be spread indiscriminately”.
“There will be a real cocktail of chemistry including significant amounts of aromatic compounds that are known to interact with DNA and have been linked to cancers. Whether or not this manifests will depend strongly on how long and serious the exposure is of any individual.
“And on top of this, once the containment provided by the tanks and pipes is destroyed the material will flow everywhere leaving a mess of harmful material that permeates the soil and coats everything else. There is the potential for contamination of drinking water supplies.”
Despite US efforts to distance itself from the attacks, there are growing fears the attack might spark a tit-for-tat cycle of retaliation after a spokesperson for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps warned it could take “similar actions [against oil infrastructure] in the region”.
On Monday, Bahrain’s state-owned energy company Bapco Energies declared force majeure on its operations after Iran attacked the country’s only oil refinery, and Saudi Arabia reported intercepting four Iranian drones targeting its Shaybah oil field.
Those attacks followed drone strikes last week on the world’s largest natural gas export plant in Qatar, the Saudi refinery at Ras Tanura, fuel storage hubs in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and multiple tankers in the Persian Gulf, each of which posed a potential environmental catastrophe.
Doug Weir, director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, said that his organisation’s efforts at tracking incidents of environmental harm caused by the fighting around the Persian Gulf was becoming increasingly difficult.
“We are now aware of hundreds of environmentally problematic incidents in Iran and the region but the ongoing conflict, internet restrictions and delays in the availability of satellite imagery mean that this figure is an understatement,” Weir said.
“Piecing together the war’s environmental footprint and its potential impacts on people and ecosystems will be a huge task, and one that grows more complex with every day that the war continues.”
“After the first few days where military sites were targeted we are now seeing an expansion into civilian and dual-use facilities, with this comes a broadening of the range of environmental and public health risks associated with military actions.”