Clean-up boats rush to France
Gooey black oil from the sunken Prestige blotched French beaches yesterday, as distraught locals awaited an armada of clean-up boats and workers. Some seven weeks after the laden tanker snapped in half off the northwest Spanish coast, the worst slicks...
Gooey black oil from the sunken Prestige blotched French beaches yesterday, as distraught locals awaited an armada of clean-up boats and workers.
Some seven weeks after the laden tanker snapped in half off the northwest Spanish coast, the worst slicks headed north towards neighbouring France which raced to limit the pollution.
A fleet of trawlers and fishing boats battled stormy seas to get to the scene, and French television showed masked emergency workers scooping viscous fuel oil into buckets, while bystanders - barred from the beaches to avoid contamination - fumed.
France has taken over from Spain in co-ordinating the clean-up, as aerial footage showed some 15 medium-sized oil slicks lurking within 80 km of the French Atlantic coast, maritime officials said.
With oil now smearing beaches running half-way up the coast, hotel owners fretted about the impact on tourism, a major source of income for the region.
"This is worse than the Erika spill," hotel owner Evelyne Baron told the daily Le Parisien, referring to the disastrous spill from the tanker Erika which sank off Brittany in 1999.
"The Erika spilled all its oil in one go, whereas with the Prestige we really don't know what will happen."
The 26-year-old single-hulled vessel, carrying 77,000 tonnes of oil, sprang a leak in November off Spain, snapped in two and sank six days later.
High winds have broken up big oil slicks and blown hundreds of thousands of globs of oil onto the popular sandy beaches of France's Landes region, near Bordeaux. Officials have predicted bigger oil deposits will land over the weekend.
Spanish media have estimated the oil slicks sweeping towards France cover an area the size of New York City.
France, which has campaigned forcefully for stricter European Union safety rules on oil tankers, this week launched a criminal inquiry into responsibility for the Prestige spill.
Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin rushed to the scene and pledged €50 million to fund the clean-up.
The Erika spill caused some $860 million of damage, and French oil giant TotalFinaElf was last year ordered to pay around $7.6 million for its role in the disaster.