Spain battles high winds in oil slick cleanup
Date: 22-Nov-02
Country: SPAIN
Author: Adrian Croft
Volunteer fishermen joined the painstaking clean-up of the toxic fuel oil that has already washed ashore from the Prestige, which snapped in two and sank 130 nautical miles off the coast on Tuesday, six days after getting into difficulty in a storm.
It could prove to be one of the world's worst oil spills as the ship carried twice as much oil as the Exxon Valdez spilled when it ran aground in Alaska in 1989.
Satellite pictures published yesterday showed a trail of oil left by the stricken vessel as it was towed out to sea. She took most of her 77,000 tonnes of fuel oil to the ocean floor some 3.6 km (two miles) below, but at least 10,000 tonnes is believed to have leaked into the Atlantic.
And the weather was not cooperating. A cold front coming in off the Atlantic pushed a wave of slicks closer to the shore of Galicia in northwest Spain.
Strong wind and driving rain was reported on the coast.
"If there are oil slicks off our coast, with this wind they will be coming ashore, whether on the beaches or the rocks," said fisherman Jose Montero, 36, inspecting his nets in Finisterre, the westernmost point of mainland Spain, where fishing has been banned for at least a month.
"We are all very worried because this is our livelihood. This is a huge problem," he said.
A Danish pilot who sailed aboard the tanker was quoted yesterday as saying the Prestige was not seaworthy before it ran into trouble in an Atlantic storm about 21 miles off the Galician coast last week.
"The ship should not have been allowed to sail. It was old and I hoped that it would be sent directly to the scrap yard as soon as it had unloaded its cargo - because that's all it was good for," Jens Jorgen Thuesen told the daily Jyllands-Posten.
"The radar and the anti-collision equipment was not functioning properly. It would never had been allowed to sail again if it had gone into a Danish or another European port."
CLEAN-UP EFFORT CALLED INADEQUTE
The leading Spanish newspaper El Pais said yesterday there were not enough ships to suck up the oil lurking off the coast, and that the government lacked enough floating plastic barriers to protect sensitive areas of the scenic coast.
The newspaper also ridiculed a cleanup effort that featured frantic work when a government minister toured a particular area with television cameras in tow - a level of activity that would not exist before or after the visit.
"The means at hand are not enough for anything in life, but we have a reasonable plan," Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy told state television yesterday in response to the reports.
"There are more than 500 people there trying to remove the slick. I think there is a French clean-up ship, another Dutch one, and a third one from Germany. So I think the collaboration is reasonable. There could always be more, but at the same time nobody is complaining," Rajoy said.
The sinking of the Prestige has led to calls for European Union laws meant to decommission single-hulled tankers and tightening inspections tpo be speeded up. Current EU president Denmark said it would put the issue to the Maritime Transport Council meeting on December 6.
French President Jacques Chirac as been one of the most vocal and visible critics, saying Europe had failed to learn its lesson after the Maltese tanker Erika split in two and sank off the northwest of France in December 1999. It was carrying 25,000 tonnes of fuel oil. (Additional reporting by Elinor Schang in Copenhagen).