ARCACHON (France), Jan 5: Oil spilled from the sunken tanker Prestige has washed up in a major oyster-producing region in southwestern France, officials said on Sunday, as a European armada raced to clean up the thick black sludge.

One of two large oil slicks 20 metres wide and 150 metres long that had been spotted at the mouth of the Bassin d’Arcachon has entered the inlet, Aquitaine regional prefect Christian Fremont told a press conference.

“There’s one that we’ve lost sight of, but the other has arrived. It’s underwater and we’re going to try to contain it,” he said following a meeting with struggling oyster farmers in the port town of Arcachon.

“The goal is to contain the oil before it hits land,” Fremont noted.

Hundreds of oyster farmers in the region, who cull 12,000 tons of oysters from the Bassin d’Arcachon every year, feared for their livelihoods as the collection and sale of all area shellfish was banned from late Saturday.

“For us, this is a catastrophe,” said oyster farmer and restaurant owner Joel Dupuch. “If I can no longer fish for oysters, I’ll be ruined.”

France declared a state of emergency along its entire Atlantic coast as oil leaking from the wreck of the Prestige, a Liberian-registered tanker that sank off northwest Spain on November 19, landed on its beaches.

The stricken ship released 20,000 tons of oil into the water, which wreaked havoc on Spain’s Galicia and Asturias regions as well as northern Portugal before being driven north towards France by high winds.

Some 200 kilometres of France’s coastline, from the southwestern corner of the country halfway up the Atlantic coast to the port city of La Rochelle, has been affected.

On Sunday, the French naval vessel D’entrecasteaux joined a fleet of ships from across Europe — Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway and Spain — off shore to help scoop up the massive globs of oil before they reach land.

Some 200 French soldiers will from Monday join civil defense experts, local staff and volunteers to help clean up the oil already washed up on French beaches and rescue birds trapped in the viscous muck.

Meanwhile, a French submarine partially plugged a crack in the hull of the Prestige from which oil was spewing out, a spokeswoman for Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said.

The French government has allocated an initial sum of 52 million dollars to help combat the pollution, with a first installment of 10 million dollars to be disbursed from Monday.

France has been pushing hard for more stringent European Union laws against risky tankers and for more accountability from vessel crews, owners, operators and flag states since 1999, when the oil tanker Erika sent a massive oil spill onto the beaches in France’s Brittany region.

French President Jacques Chirac lashed out Friday at what he called “the shady businessman, the hoodlums of the sea” whom he accused of taking advantage of complex international shipping regulations.

In an interview published in Le Journal du Dimanche, Environment Minister Roselyne Bachelot urged the public to back the government’s anti-pollution initiatives, saying: “They must say that they’re fed up! Oil slicks threaten all European countries with a coastline, especially in the Mediterranean.”

Patches of oil reappeared on Sunday on the beaches of Galicia, but local fishermen and Spanish officials said the globs were not part of a new slick but likely had come from previously polluted beaches.—AFP