BEACH TAR CONTAMINATION IN JAMAICA

The quantity of stranded beach tar on Jamaican beaches was measured by collecting beach tar residues from twenty-nine beach stations around the Jamaican coast on monthly visits for 13 months. Stranded beach tar was found to be very persistent. The east coast and Kingston Harbour Area are subjected to constant relatively large amounts of fresh tar; the north coast, although receiving small amounts of fresh tar, appeared to have been impacted by a particular incident about two years ago giving highly skewed distributions; the west coast is virtually clean and the south coast (with the exception of the Kingston Harbour Area) showed no evidence of stranded beach tar pollution at any time during the study. © 1990.