The government of Spain’s top wine-making region has given 2 340 bottles of red wine to pilots, sailors and other people who will spend Christmas monitoring or cleaning up oil from a sunken tanker.
Pedro Sanz Alonso, president of the northern Rioja region, said on Monday the Christmas gift sent last week was for ”Spaniards and foreigners who, under direct orders from the Spanish government, will remain on alert during the Christmas holidays,” the national news agency Efe said.
The wine from a vineyard owned by the Rioja government will go to 780 people including crew on civilian and military ships scooping up fuel oil from the tanker Prestige, which broke in two and sank in the Atlantic last month off the coast of Spain’s northwest Galicia region. Each will get a case with three bottles, Alonso’s office said.
Strong winds from the south kept the most menacing slick 40 nautical miles north of Galicia’s northwest tip, the Galician regional government said. Storms at sea also thwarted some clean-up operations, it added.
The Prestige has spilled an estimated quarter of the 77 000 metric tons of fuel oil it was carrying, fouling hundreds of kilometers of coast and forcing thousands of fishermen and other sea-dependent workers to live off government handouts.
The Spanish government has hired a French research sub to try to seal more than a dozen cracks and holes through which oil continues to leak from the wreck of the ship. – Sapa-AP