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the Prestige debacle, part 2 - November & December 2002
23.12.02 The scattered collection of oil slicks has now cleared the Galician coast, heading north into the Portugal current at a rate of 2 km/hour. This puts the oil on an ideal trajectory for meeting the west winds expected later in the week. And then the oil would probably be blown directly onto French beaches. Madrid reports that 15,000 tonnes of oil have now been recovered from the sea. Yesterday, close to 10,000 people 7,000 volunteers and 3,000 military were on the Galician shores, collecting up the viscous gunge. Local fishing families have started catering for the volunteers, cooking huge pots of mussels. Because the 120 km/hour wind has caused a large swell, some 5 to 7 metres high, it has been impossible to use the pumping boats to collect oil. The locals fear that the big waves will slop oil over their floating barrages set to protect the shellfish beds. 22.12.02 For the fourth consecutive day, waves of fuel oil from the latest slick batter the côte de la Mort, at the tip of Galicia. The worst affected beaches are those close to Carnota and Muxia, where the sand is totally covered with a thick, lumpy mess of oil. Over 20,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil are now estimated to have escaped from the wreck of the Prestige. A large, but dispersed, collection of slicks has been spotted, scattered
over an area up to 30 kilometres wide (an area akin to that of New York
City), and currently heading northwards, away from Galician beaches. The Nautile has put a further three patches on the leaking sunken
wreck. Now only the Spanish military (a 2000-strong contingent) is cleaning
the rocky areas, while volunteers are cleaning the sandy beach areas.
Why? Because the large areas of thick oil provide greater dangers of being
poisoned while trying to clear the stuff. 23.12.02 The scattered collection of oil slicks has now cleared the Galician coast, heading north into the Portugal current at a rate of 2 km/hour. This puts the oil on an ideal trajectory for meeting the west winds expected later in the week. And then the oil would probably be blown directly onto French beaches. Madrid reports that 15,000 tonnes of oil have now been recovered from the sea. Yesterday, close to 10,000 people 7,000 volunteers and 3,000 military were on the Galician shores, collecting up the viscous gunge. Local fishing families have started catering for the volunteers, cooking huge pots of mussels. Because the 120 km/hour wind has caused a large swell, some 5 to 7 metres high, it has been impossible to use the pumping boats to collect oil. The locals fear that the big waves will slop oil over their floating barrages set to protect the shellfish beds. 22.12.02 For the fourth consecutive day, waves of fuel oil from the latest slick batter the côte de la Mort, at the tip of Galicia. The worst affected beaches are those close to Carnota and Muxia, where the sand is totally covered with a thick, lumpy mess of oil. Over 20,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil are now estimated to have escaped from the wreck of the Prestige. A large, but dispersed, collection of slicks has been spotted, scattered
over an area up to 30 kilometres wide (an area akin to that of New York
City), and currently heading northwards, away from Galician beaches. The Nautile has put a further three patches on the leaking sunken
wreck. Now only the Spanish military (a 2000-strong contingent) is cleaning
the rocky areas, while volunteers are cleaning the sandy beach areas.
Why? Because the large areas of thick oil provide greater dangers of being
poisoned while trying to clear the stuff. 20.12.02 The local Galician weather forecast (at Xunta de Galicia) predicts a storm during Saturday, with seas of up to 5 metres and winds ranging from Force 5 to Force 8 . The forecast concludes that the weather and sea conditions will make recovering oil from either sea or the beaches a difficult task. The French Navy daily communiqué indicates that, despite the oil becoming ever more dispersed, 3 tonnes were collected in the previous 24 hours off Santander. 19.12.02 The feared third slick has arrived on Galician beaches about a metre thick in places, and very sloppy from being emulsified, it will probably be even harder to clear up. Despite the patch, oil is still leaking at the same overall rate as previously (125 tonnes/day) through the remaining 14 cracks. Reported in Nature: A Smit Salvage spokesman says that the hulk will rust through in time. The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WFN) reports that 3000 birds have been
recovered dead or soaked in heavy oil. For every bird recovered, there
are another 10 damaged or killed at sea. The Iberian guillemot should be considered as technically extinct. The environmental damage is not confined to birds and the coast. The food chain, from plankton upwards, is beng poisoned by the highly toxic heavy oil. This toxicity could well continue to poison fish stocks, as wall as marine mammals such as dolphins and porpoises. 18.12.02 It appears that the patch put over one of the leaks last week by the French submarine, the Nautile, is effective. The Spanish government is now planning that, in due course a further ten patches will be applied. However, most locals do not believe it will work. Other cracks will appear under the pressure of being 3,500 metres down. But would the sueggested solution of encasing the wreck in concrete fare any better? In the meanwhile, however, Galician fishermen report that a third slick is now arriving on their beaches, as they find fresh patches of oil. 15.12.02 It is reported that, thus far, about 300 volunteers who had helped cleared the oil from the Galician beaches have been treated for respiratory problems and for vomiting after inhaling the poisonous oil. 14.12.02 27,000 tonnes have now escaped from the wreck. The oil, broken up by wind and waves, is being tricky to collect from the sea, although the French method using two trawlers and a special net is having results. The workers on the Galacian beaches fear the arrival of the next slew of oil. There are now 9 streams of oil escaping from the bow section and 5 streams from the stern section of the Prestige, leaking in all 125 tonnes a day. The oil takes about a day to reach the surface. At that rate we are talking about a year or two of further continual mess; but my expectation would be that the pressure will increasingly crush the hull and speed up the flow. At St. Jean de Luz, rocks are being sprayed with a patented anti-sticking product, hoping that the oil will just slip off the rocks with the ebbing tide. (The product is said to bio-degrade in a week and to be non-toxic.) The oil could then be cleaned from the beaches more easily, although care has to be taken to remove as little sand as possible. On this stretch of coast the sand tends to be eroded, rather than deposited. Another French innovation, devised after the lessons learnt from the Erika spill three years ago, is the use of very small-holed disposable nets to catch the floating oil. The oil slithers through normal nets, at the same time covering them in a sticky, pervasive coating of black. The disposable nets avoid the thankless task of trying to clean nets before being able to re-use them. The three-man submarine, the Nautile, has now verified that both the bow and the stern parts of the wreck are leaking oil. The oil is not solidifying, 3500 metres down, at a temperature of about 2.5°C. While the Spanish prepare for a third slick to arrive on Galacian coast, fuel oil has been seen just 10 kms from Hendaye, France. However, the wind is keeping the oil from arriving on the French coast yet. Over 300 Spanish beaches are now polluted by the Prestiges cargo. Predictions about when, or if, oil will arrive on French coasts are being
made difficult by the pancakes and pellets of oil being widely dispersed,
and by some of them being below the sea surface.
The submersed, generally smaller, lumps are difficult to see and will
probably be carried quickly by the current, uninfluenced by winds. Tar
blown inshore has been seen on beaches at Bilbao on the Spanish Basque
coast. The little
yellow submarine from France, the Nautile, has provided film
of a slow continuous string of gel-like oil escaping from fissures in
the wreck of the Prestige. The current water temperature is about
2°C. The holds have not yet been inspected. Increasing resources are being deployed by the French in the game of
chase the slick. Brest laboratories have confirmed that the
oil from the more recent slicks of North Spain also comes from the Prestige,
not from another ship cleaning its tanks, as the Spanish authorities had
suggested. The Portugal
current forms off Lisbon in autumn when the prevailing wind
turns to west-south-west. It is a warm current that flows north and east
past the north coast of Spain and then up the west coast of France, following
the edge of the continental plateau. By December, it is off the Arcachon
Basin, and by January it is off Brittany. The current is about 100 kilometres
wide and 300 metres deep. It flows at an average of 1 km/hr, with a top
speed of 3.5 km/hr. The French coastguard service say that various fragments of slick are now advancing along the north Spanish coast towards the French coast, while the Spanish government has revised upwards the amount of oil spilled to 17,000 tonnes. New oil appearing on the sea is described by a local salvage company as coming from the sunken Prestige , but by the Spanish government officials as from an unknown ship discharging its tanks. The type of fuel oil transported by the Prestige is the same
sort (residual
fuel oil) that escaped from the wreck of the Erika,
which sank off west Brittany in December 1999. Fuel oil from that spill,
of only about 10,000 metric tonnes, is still being found on beaches on
the north-west of France. The prevailing winds are blowing the oil towards the Spanish coast and
onshore. The beaches and rocks will have to be cleaned and recleaned to
keep them oil-free. In the sea the two main slicks threatening the coast
are breaking up, making its collection still more difficult. The local fishing industry has been stopped as fishes,
scallops and mussels, as well as exotic delicacies such as Percebes
(goose barnacles) and spider crabs, ingest the heavy fuel oil. This contains
much highly carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; and heavy oil
tends to stick to the ocean sediments on which marine creepy-crawlies
wander and from which they dine. (Not the sort of thing you want to eat
with your dinner.) The invasive pollution could, as in the case of the
Erika,
result in the long-term contamination of shellfish beds, and the closure
of parts of fisheries around inlets where a lot of oil has settled. Spains monarch, King Juan Carlos has visited the Galician coast
to see the mess and give support to the beleaguered local people. Strangely,
Spains Prime Minister, usually quick to be present at the scene
of disasters, has not visited the area since the oil started escaping
in mid-November. The seabirds are also suffering. Not only do they live on the sea, they
dive below it to fish, so they need cleaning outside and in. It is reckoned
that only about 50% of rescued and cleaned birds survive. And what of the wreck itself? The
long-terms effects of oil pollution are slowly becoming apparent.
When the sea and weather conditions permit, floating oil is removed from
the sea by using giant vacuum cleaners. On Saturday 30 November
the flotilla of clean-up boats from many European countries (but not including
Spain) removed a record amount of 3,000 tonnes of fuel oil. However, the
wind and seas kicked up again and the next day no cleaning was possible. Guided by spotter planes, pairs of French trawlers from St. Jean de
Luz are making their first attempt, using specially adapted filter nets,
to clear the slick patches approaching the Pays Basque coast. The oil
cannot not be vacuumed because the lumps are too dispersed and too
small. The Spanish authorities have set droves of khaki and yellow-suited military,
including students of a naval school, to clear and re-clear the beaches.
Local fishermen and their families, as well as students, are piling into
help, but is a daunting task with the constant threat of new waves of
muck. The local fishermen are now spending their own money on floats,
plastic sheeting, chains and other equipment to try and rig up defences
for their ports and shellfisheries, because the authorities are failing
to act effectively. This disaster threatening much of the west coast of Europe may have been considerably aggravated by the behaviour of the Spanish authorities. Here is a gallery of 10 clear pictures of the Prestige disaster.
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related material The Prestige: Latest reports (Jan. 2003) The politics of irresponsibility (Jan 2003) The politics of irresponsibility (Nov & Dec 2002) Another potential ecological oil mess (Nov. 2002) |
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email email_abelard [at] abelard.org © abelard, 2002, 31 december the address for this document is https://www.abelard.org/news/archive-oil1-4.htm 3000 words |