The crippled, ageing oil tanker Prestige finally sank 208 kilometres off the north-west coast of Spain yesterday, taking 70 000 tons of highly destructive fuel oil to the ocean floor and threatening Europe’s biggest ecological disaster in decades.
With environmentalists and some experts warning last night that the tanker’s deadly cargo would inevitably leak and rise to the surface, the western coast of Spain and Portugal was gripped by fear and uncertainty.
Many feared that a huge slick of oil, up to 20 times bigger than the one already released by the 26-year-old Prestige at the weekend, would form overnight and be blown inshore by westerly winds over the coming days.
European leaders expressed deep concern at the uncertain future of one of the continent’s richest fish-breeding grounds and most unspoilt coasts. The French president, Jacques Chirac, called for ”draconian” measures to prevent similar accidents happening again.
His call came as it emerged that the ship might have split apart at a point in its hull which had been previously rewelded. The ship is also believed to have been responsible for another oil spill off Texas in 1993, according to the US coastguard website.
David Osler, industrial editor of the shipping newspaper Loyds List, told the Guardian the Prestige was one of a large number of oil tankers built in Japan during the boom years of the 1970s which have triggered international disputes over maritime safety.
”These tankers were churned out, mass produced using steel turned out to the lowest possible standard,” he said. ”Out of a global fleet of 1 800 oil tankers, around 300 are pre-1980, Japanese and single-hulled. They are being phased out but some have been given a period of grace until as late as 2015.”
The six-day saga of the stricken Prestige ended when the prow of the boat slipped under five-metre Atlantic waves 208 kilometres west of Spain’s Cies Islands yesterday afternoon. Earlier in the day the tanker, which was being dragged south and west by rescue tugs as it leaked its cargo, split in two and the aft section sank 3 000 metres on to the bed of the fish-rich Galician banks.
Spain and Portugal had refused repeated requests for the Prestige to be taken to a harbour where the fuel could be transferred to another vessel. The Dutch salvage company Smit International had said it would tow the vessel to Africa if necessary.
But the Prestige finally gave up the struggle to stay afloat in the rough Atlantic. ”We can say goodbye to the ship and its cargo,” Lars Walder of Smit said shortly after 4pm.
Environmentalists immediately warned that the sunken tanker, which had released enough oil to blacken some 160 kilometres of the rugged stretch of Spain’s north-west shore known as the Coast of Death, was a timebomb sitting on the bottom of the sea.
”If all that escapes from the hull then this is a disaster which is going to have twice the effect of the Exxon Valdez, which is one of the worst that we have known,” Christopher Hails of WWF warned, referring to the tanker which ran aground in Alaska in 1989.
Maria Jose Caballero of Greenpeace said a vessel whose hull had cracked in open sea could not be expected to withstand the high pressures on the ocean floor: ”The vessel cracked in the hull because it was very old. Nothing makes us believe it won’t finally burst.”
Before sinking, the Prestige left a 110 by 8 kilometre slick of oil released over the past two days. That slick, the second released in the tanker’s death throes, was already being driven towards the coast last night. Two of Spain’s most delicate nature reserves, the Cies and the Ons islands, would be the first to be destroyed by a tide of black oil.
”These are important habitats for turtles, seals, birds, invertebrates and algae,” said Ezekiel Navio of WWF.
Fishermen in the Spanish port of Cambados yesterday confirmed that, despite official claims that all the oil was north of Cape Finisterre, it had already reached coastal areas to the south.
”One the trawlers that was out last night came back with its nets completely covered with oil. All you can do when that happens is throw it away,” said trawler skipper Claudio Otero.
Benito Gonzalez, chairman of the town’s Fishermen’s Guild said the whole of the Ria Arousa, a sea loch famed for its shellfish and providing nearly two-thirds of Spain’s mussels, was in a state of fear.
”Everybody here lives from the sea,” he said. ”If this gets into this area the mussels will be ruined and thousands of people will suffer. It will cause more than triple the damage already suffered on the Coast of Death.”
Although fishermen differed on whether the oil was more likely to solidify in the cold ocean depths and sink to the bottom, or float up to form a massive slick, they all condemned the Spanish government’s handling of the salvage.
”They should have taken it into an estuary somewhere and allowed all the fuel to be taken off,” said Jose Antonio Dominguez, who cultivates mussels. ”If the boat had sunk, at least only one loch would have been affected. Now we will all suffer.”
Madrid yesterday insisted it had done the right thing by expelling the Prestige from its waters. But Mr Chirac accused other leaders of failing to tackle the world’s ageing tanker fleet, saying the EU had sworn to take urgent measures after the Erika tanker polluted swaths of France’s Atlantic coastline in 1999.
”I am horrified by the inability of those in charge, politically, nationally and particularly at European level, to take action,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited (c) 2001