Prestige oil threatens French coast

FRANCE'S Atlantic coast could be swamped with oil from the sunken tanker Prestige within days after high winds tore up an oil slick out at sea, authorities said yesterday.

"An oil slick that drifted to La Rochelle is being broken into millions of small pellets by winds and currents," said the prefect of the southwestern Aquitaine region, Christain Fremont.

"If these winds continue to blow this pollution will arrive on a vast scale very soon, perhaps even this weekend."

Blobs of oil have already washed up on Atlantic beaches in the Landes region near Bordeaux, southwest France.

As coastal towns braced for the worst, President Jacques Chirac lambasted the "gangsters of the sea" he said were to blame for the spill, and rushed his prime minister and ecology minister to the southwest to hatch anti-pollution measures.

"This was not inevitable, it was the result of human actions," said Chirac. "France and Europe must not leave these shady men, these gangsters of the sea, to profit cynically from the lack of transparency in the current system," he said.

Chirac told reporters after a cabinet meeting he had asked European Commission President Romano Prodi to speed the introduction of EU measures to punish those responsible for shipping disasters.

France has campaigned forcefully in recent months for stricter EU safety rules on vessels plying European waters especially single-hulled tankers like the 26-year-old Prestige.

The Prestige, laden with 77,000 tons of oil, sprang a leak in November off the northwest Spanish coast and sank six days later after snapping in half.

France has launched a criminal inquiry to establish responsibility for the Prestige spill. Ecology Minister Roselyne Bachelot warned those who live and work along the southwestern coast to be ready for the pollution to get worse, as larger oil slicks from the Prestige drifted 60 miles offshore.

For the French, the ominous black blobs revive painful memories of the 1999 spill from the tanker Erika, which sank off the Brittany coast causing some $860 million of damage. French oil giant TotalFinaElf was last year ordered to pay around $7.6 million for its part in the Erika disaster.

Spanish media has estimated the oil slicks sweeping toward France cover an area the size of New York City.

Bachelot and Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin will visit beaches in the Gironde region near Bordeaux on Friday afternoon and meet local authorities to decide on anti-pollution measures.