History
Prestige Oil Disaster - Five Years On
By h.b. - Nov 13, 2007 - 7:24 AM
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This 26 year old single-hulled vessel, longer than two football fields, was registered in the Bahamas, was owned by a Liberian company, was managed by another company based in Greece, and was insured in London. It was carrying 77,000 tons of fuel oil for a Swiss subsidiary – originally formed in Gibraltar - of a Russian consortium.
The SOS call went out at 3.15 pm when the ship suffered hull damage in one of its ballast tanks and began to take on water, 28 miles to the west of Finisterre. The Prestige was now listing between 25 and 45 degrees to starboard, and was being battered by waves up to 10 metres high, with a five mile slick of oil already shed into the sea.
Rescue helicopters arrived to fly off most of the 27 crew, while the captain, his first officer and the chief engineer remained on board to try and secure a tow line to a salvage tug, as the Prestige drifted within a few kilometres of the coast. The Greek captain, Apostolos Mangouras, managed to correct the list by flooding the opposite ballast tanks, and started the auxiliary engines. He was refused permission for the ship to enter a port of refuge for its cargo to be transferred to another ship, and was taken off the tanker on 15th November and arrested for harming the environment and allegedly disobeying orders to steer the ship away from the coast. He denied the charge.
Spain refused to allow the stricken vessel to dock at any Spanish port and ordered it to be towed out to sea. Portugal also refused permission for the tanker to enter its waters, and the Prestige finally broke in two on 19th November, and went down 260 kms off the Islas Cíes.
The consequences for the Galicia coastline, and also for the region’s fishing industry, were disastrous. According to official figures released a year after the accident, the Prestige shed 63,000 tons of fuel oil along the coast of Portugal, Galicia and Cantabria, with the pollution also spreading to beaches in France. The WWF environmental organisation estimated that 300,000 sea birds died.
A new government report on the disaster in November 2007 said 53,137,98 tons of fuel residue had been cleared from Galicia’s beaches up until December 2004, and added that the wreck – which still lies on the sea bed – and the remaining fuel it contains is no longer a threat for the coast. The Repsol oil company extracted a further 14,000 tons of the fuel remaining in its tanks and carried out their third inspection of the wreck in September 2007.
Spain’s Deputy Prime Minister, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, said the Prestige no longer poses a threat to the environment, and thanked the hundreds of thousands of volunteers from across Spain who helped in the cleanup operation, together with local residents and fishermen, members of the Armed Forces and specialised personnel brought in for the job. The Minister said more than 147.3 million € compensation was paid out to almost 20,000 people who saw their livelihood affected by the catastrophe, plus a further 153 million to the Town Halls and autonomous communities affected by the spill.
She said a hundred or so government-funded studies have been carried out on the consequences of the Prestige disaster, that the Coastguard now have much greater resources at their disposal, and advances have been made both from a technical and a legislative point of view.
A new law agreed by the European Union in 2005 to hold ship owners and captains responsible for polluting the sea will now however have to be rewritten, after the European Court of Justice ruled earlier this year that it had not been properly drafted by the EU member states.
The law was scrapped just seven months after it came into effect in March 2007.
Court investigations meanwhile continue in the instruction court in Corcubión, A Coruña, and in the United States, in the New York District Court, with a lawsuit lodged by Spain against the American Bureau of Shipping for alleged deficiencies in surveys of the tanker.
There are now more than 100,000 sheets in the Corcubión case summary, with the last expert reports to determine whether the decisions taken by Captain Mangouras, and also the order from the Spanish government to move the tanker away from the coast, were correct, expected to be submitted next Spring.
There are more than 100 private accusations in the case, from individuals in both Spain and France, to fishermen’s guilds, Town Halls, the ‘Nunca Máis’ platform, and political parties. A total of 28 reports were requested from a number of countries – including Russia, Greek, China, Morocco and the Philippines – as well as the results submitted by parliamentary investigatory commissions set up in the Galicia regional parliament and the Spanish parliament.
The Galicia court is also hearing the cases brought by those affected in France.
A lawyer for Nunca Máis told El Publico newspaper that the trial could start at the end of 2008, when it will be more than six years since the Prestige went down.
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