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He was one of hundreds of thousands of volunteers who joined hands to clean up the blackened coast of the Taean region, about 150 kilometers (95 miles) southwest of Seoul.
"When I came here the first time early last month, I was so surprised to see beaches and marine farms seriously destroyed by crude oil. The place has gotten much better, but the damage is still serious even more than one month later," the 55-year-old cab driver said, while scrubbing blackened gravel with an absorbent cloth in the freezing weather.
"I will return to my hometown tomorrow to earn money, but will come here again soon for the clean-up," said Lee, who said he had traveled to this coastline already four times since the oil spill on Dec. 7.
Lee praised South Koreans who responded to the country's worst oil spill by launching its biggest volunteer movement to clean up the blackened shoreline. According to the local government, 1 million volunteers of all ages -- from elementary school students to housewives and to aged war veterans -- have flocked here to combat the environmental catastrophe.
"Compared to clean-up efforts in oil spill cases in foreign countries, our efforts are worth entering in the Guinness book," said Lee Wan-koo, governor of South Chungcheong province, whose long coastline was affected by the oil spill. More than 400,000 military and police personnel and civil servants have also been mobilized to clean up the affected area.
But there is still a long way to go before the once scenic beaches and coastline will be restored, as oil that has sunk to the seabed will cause problems for many years to come. Volunteers are cleaning blackened pebbles by hand with shovels and absorbent cloth, but underneath them the sand remains soaked in oil.
"All day, we have been scrubbing boulders coated with oil and scooping up sand soaked with oil. But tar balls are washing up ashore again, soaking the sand and gravel," said Cha Sul-ki, a 15-year-old student who volunteered to help clean up the area with her family and friends. "I am not sure we can clean up this beach," she said, using rubber-gloved hands with shovels and absorbent cloth to remove oil from sand and rocks.
"The offshore clean-up will be completed, but onshore sand, oil glued to rocks and gravel, and hard-to-reach areas will continue to need clean-up over a long period of time," Governor Lee told a group of foreign correspondents.
The state-run Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute said it would take at least two or three months to initially wash the affected beaches.
According to the Environment Ministry, at least three years are needed for seaweed and lugworm species to return to the region, and five years for clams and shellfish. At least a decade is necessary for plants to grow back in the region, and it will take three decades to restore the entire area back to its pre-spill state, it said.
The Dec. 7 accident occurred after a barge slammed into an oil tanker in stormy seas, which leaked 12,547 kiloliters of crude oil into western coastal waters. The barge, run by South Korea's Samsung Heavy Industries, lurched toward the Hebei Spirit, a Hong Kong-registered oil tanker, which was at anchor, and punched three holes into its hull, causing the spill.
The massive spill blackened scenic beaches, bird sanctuaries and fisheries in the country's national parks in the ecologically pristine region. The oil slick, which affected 167 kilometers of coastline and contaminated 59 islands, was about one-third the size of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, considered the costliest on record.
It has also devastated the livelihoods of about 40,000 residents as the fishing industry has died and tourism has dried up. Two oyster farmers killed themselves separately by drinking pesticide last month after their farms were destroyed by the spill. Last weekend another resident -- a fish seller -- died after drinking poison and setting himself ablaze in a protest.
Taean residents are calling on companies involved in the spill to pay "full compensation" and take "unlimited responsibility" for the damage, which runs into the millions of dollars. Some 3,700 residents and environmentalists gathered on Wednesday in front of the building of Samsung Group that owns Samsung Heavy Industries to call for quick and full compensation. Angry protesters used hammers to smash mock models of the two ships that caused the spill. Some expressed their anger by throwing away fish, sea cucumbers and seaweed tainted by the oil.
Earlier this week, South Korean prosecutors indicted Samsung Heavy Industries and Hebei Spirit whose ships crashed and caused the oil spill. The prosecution also charged three South Korean captains of the barge and its two tugboats, along with two Indians who operated the oil tanker.
The worst spill on the west coast came a week after the country's southern coastal town of Yeosu won the right to be the host in 2012 for an international event, called Expo, largely on the back of championing the theme of "the living ocean and coast" to bolster environmental awareness against global warming.
But the scenic coastal area is vulnerable to oil spill because it houses the country's five oil refiners and major petrochemical plants which receive crude from oil tankers, mostly from the Middle East. Energy-poor South Korea is the world's fourth-largest crude importer.
In 1995, 5,035 tons of oil spilled onto the southern coast of Yeosu, heavily dependent on aquatic produce, and led to a loss of US$100 million in damage to fishermen and their fishing farms.
