Spain yesterday ordered a scientific commission to find a way of raising or sealing off some 50 000 tons of fuel oil from the sunken tanker Prestige, as it confirmed the vessel would keep leaking the thick oil for more than three years.
Among other possibilities reportedly being studied by the commission were the raising of the two sunken sections of the vessel, the plugging of holes in its disintegrating carcass, and its burial under tons of cement.
The centre-right government of Jose Maria Aznar, which has been heavily criticised for its handling of the Prestige affair, finally admitted on Tuesday that the tanker was still leaking 125 tons of fuel oil a day from some 14 separate cracks.
Smit International, the salvage company which raised the Russian submarine Kursk, was the first to make public an offer to recover the fuel yesterday.
The company’s operations manager, Kees van Essen, estimated that the job would take three months and cost about R500-million.
”We have based our plan on the experience we have acquired over the years,” he said, citing the refloating of the Kursk and the Japanese navy’s training ship Ehime Maru, and the extraction of 4 000 tons of chemicals from a ship on the bottom of the English channel.
Anyone trying to extract the fuel would face the arduous task of dealing with a wreck that lies more than two miles under the surface of the Atlantic, in an area about 300 kilometres off cape Finisterre, which is infamous for its bad weather.
Smit already knows the Prestige well, as it was towing it away from the Spanish coast when it sank.
Emilio Lora-Tamayo, the president of the commission formed by the Spanish gov ernment to deal with the disaster, told the newspaper El Pais on Wednesday that a remote-control submarine would start checking whether the holes in the wreck could be plugged.
He estimated that it would take up to 39 months for all the oil to escape from the wreck. – Guardian Unlimited (c) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001