SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA (Spain), Dec 1: Up to 200,000 angry Spaniards demonstrated in the capital of Galicia on Sunday for better protection of their coasts as 9,000 tons of heavy fuel oil from a sunken tanker threatened to wash ashore.
With worsening weather, the slick of the fuel oil that has been floating off Spain’s northwestern coast since the tanker Prestige sank 12 days ago was expected to wash ashore on Sunday.
The biggest slick, some 400 metres wide, was spotted on Saturday about 30 kilometres offshore and expected to soil 50 kilometres of coastline.
Some patches washed up on Sunday on beaches at Muxia, about 120 kilometres west of La Coruna.
Police estimated 150,000-200,000 people responded to calls from fisheries associations, environmentalists, unionists and parties to gather here to protest inadequate coastal protection despite four sinkings off the Galician coast in the past 26 years.
The latest catastrophe has paralysed fisheries on which much of the local economy depends. Up to 15,000 seabirds are reported dead, with 140 beaches polluted.
The 250-kilometre coastal stretch affected by the spill — called the Coast of Death — runs between La Coruna in the north and Cape Finisterre further south.
Thirty vessels with dangerous cargoes sail along the Galician coastline each day, noted Jose Manuel Beiras, head of the Galician nationalist bloc the BNG.
The central government in Madrid had learned nothing from case of the tanker Erika, which sank off France’s Brittany coast in 1999, causing ecological havoc, he said.
Spain still has no specialised anti-pollution vessels to pump up slicks like the fleet rushed to the scene from other European countries following the Prestige disaster.
Nor were there ocean barriers to prevent spills filtering into vulnerable little streams containing precious seafood stocks.
“We’ve been here before in 1992, saying the same things, but nothing has changed,” said a spokesman of the environmentalist group Greenpeace, in a reference to the sinking of the tanker Aegean Sea.
Demonstrators also protested against what one group called “pathetic attempts to minimise the gravity of the disaster.”
An opinion poll in the newspaper Voz de Galicia said 68 percent of Galicians believed they had been victims of disinformation.
Demonstrators claimed there was censorship of national and regional public television. Local media say these received guidelines to be cautious in their reporting.
One woman who collects mussels in the Rias Baixas, a river flowing into the sea as yet unpolluted, refused to believe officials that 60,000 tons of heavy fuel oil that went down with the Prestige some 250 kilometres from the coast was not leaking out of the ship.
“God knows how many more years we’re going to see that oil coming up,” she said.
The spokesman of the La Coruna fisheries association condemned attempts to minimise things:
“We all well know it’s more serious than it looks on the surface,” he said: “The oil we’re bringing up in our fishing nets is at the bottom, invisible, but it’ll still kill us.
“I don’t give a hoot whether the beaches are filthy. What I want is for the sea bottom to be clean.”
Heavy weather has frustrated the eight specialised anti-pollution vessels which have formed a barrier off Cape Tourinan.
The French submarine Nautilus docked on Sunday at the port of Vigo, in preparation for a wreck survey of the Prestige.
The Prestige broke up and sank on Nov 19, taking more than 60,000 tons of fuel oil with it to the bottom, while 10,000 tons escaped.
Spain on Sunday prevented an oil tanker, whose hull is more than 15 years old, from accessing an “exclusive economic zone” up to 200 nautical miles off its coast.
France and Spain agreed last week to apply tougher restrictions to keep ships with dangerous cargoes away from their coastlines.—AFP