Concerns linger over oil spill effects

A YEAR ago, towns and beaches near here were awash with toxic fuel from the Prestige oil spill.

Now, the area appears to have undergone a miraculous facelift. While the Spanish government is openly optimistic that the worst has passed, residents and environmentalists were not so sanguine.

"When I saw this beach last year, my heart sank. But I never thought I'd see it so clean so quickly," said Emeritus Romar Casal, a 45-year-old housewife and one of thousands of workers, volunteers and soldiers who has spent most of the past year scouring the region clean. "But if you ask me," she said, while scraping filthy tar off rocks one by one with a plastering tool, "it's neither as clean as some say nor as bad as others would have it."

Behind her, gigantic white waves of the Atlantic crashed and pine trees and pastures ran down to a golden shore. But as Romar points out, much of the oil is still there. The sea still throws up tons of the gooey black globs albeit in small biscuit size now rather than the blankets of before. And unknown quantities lie beneath the sand and hidden among rocks.

Yesterday, protesters throughout northwest Spain planned anniversary demonstrations with the battle cry "never again".

A year on, officials and marine experts are at odds over the disaster and the lingering environmental threat. All agree it could easily happen again.

The 26-year-old, single-hulled Prestige, with 20.5 million gallons of fuel oil aboard, ruptured in a storm near here on November 13, 2002.

Ordered away from shore, the tanker sank days later, disgorging most of its cargo. It lost an estimated 17 million gallons, nearly twice that of Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989. The oil spread south to Portugal and along Spain to southwestern France.

It was a huge blow to Galicia, one of the world's richest fishing grounds. Fishing was banned and thousands of people spent months living off handouts.

Estimates put the total cleanup and fishing sector losses at $9.2 billion over a decade. Government officials are hopeful about a recovery, but ecologists in international environmental groups such as WWF and Greenpeace disagree.

Government agencies say the fish and shellfish coming out of the sea are safe. But Coruna university biologist Juan Freire says high levels of dangerous chemicals from the oil have been found in fish, octopus, squid, clams, goose barnacles and mussels.

He says these will likely affect reproduction and could cause problems for people eating them.