20 million gallon 'time bomb' threatens Spanish coast

Cleanup crews braced today for the possibility of a massive oil spill and environmental catastrophe, propping up 18 miles of floating booms around the spot where an oil tanker broke in two and sank in the Atlantic.

The hope is that the more than 20 million gallons of oil on board will sink and harden in the deep, frigid waters before inflicting disaster and engulf the area’s rich fishing grounds.

However, the sticky, toxic cargo from the Bahamas-flagged tanker, which went down yesterday, has already blackened 125 miles of Spanish coastline.

“We hope that the sunken part does not spill its fuel,” said Maria Jose Caballero, who heads Greenpeace’s coastal protection project. “But still it’s a time bomb at the bottom of the sea.”

After six days at sea, the leaking, 26-year-old, single-hulled Prestige broke in two pieces and sank in 11,550 feet of water about 150 miles off the Coast of Death in Spain’s Galicia region.

The Prestige had 77,000 tons of oil with the consistency of chewing gum on board – nearly twice the amount of the crude oil spilled in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez that led to devastation in Alaska.

The tanker had begun leaking a week ago when it ruptured in a storm, blackening beaches and killing wildlife along a 125 mile stretch of craggy coastline.

The Spanish government estimates that it leaked one million gallons of oil as it went down, about the same amount it spilled at the outset of the disaster.

“There’s nothing that makes us believe it won’t finally burst and leak all its oil,” Caballero said. “It’s insoluble, viscous and sticky, which makes it difficult for the clean-up operations.”

Fuel oil, used to power ship engines and electricity plants, is on average harder to clean up than crude oil, experts say. The latter disperses in sea water but fuel oil turns to sticky lumps.

“It’s a big, sticky, gooey mess a bit like molten asphalt,” said Unni Einemo, senior editor at Bunkerworld, a London-based news service for the marine fuels indtry.

The hope is that most of the fuel oil went down with the ship. “If it sinks into cold water, this stuff solidifies so much that it basically stays there,” said Einemo.

Jose Luis Garcia Fierro, a petroleum chemist at the Council for Scientific Research, Spain’s top scientific body, said that if the oil does in fact solidify because of the low temperature and high pressure, “of all the worst consequences, that is the least bad.”

But he said if the tanker is floating under the surface, it will continue to leak oil.

At stake in Spain’s misty, green north-west corner is a fishing and seafood industry that feeds much of the country and does more than £315m in business each year. It employs tens of thousands of people who catch, process or sell everything from monkfish to mussels.

The ship’s rupture and sinking has also raised questions about older, single-hull ships like the Prestige that are due to be phased out by 2015 and what Europe does to keep them safe and inspected in the meantime.

The European Union charged that ships like the Prestige skirt European ports to avoid tough new EU-mandated inspection rules, and it urged national governments to work harder to enforce them.

The Prestige, which was scheduled to be decommissioned in March 2005, had no history of major safety problems and had been inspected as recently as last month in St Petersburg, Russia, said the American Bureau of Shipping, a Houston, Texas-based firm that validates a ship’s structural and mechanical fitness.

“At the time of this incident, the Prestige was fully in compliance with all of our requirements,” said Stewart Wade, an ABS vice president.

The tanker was built to ABS specifications in 1976, Wade said. After its construction, the ship underwent annual inspections as well as more detailed ones every five years.

The last detailed inspection – done in dry dock in China over several weeks - occurred in May 2001, when the thickness of the steel hull was carefully measured and some ”steel renewal” was done, Wade said.

“It’s very common, particularly in older vessels,” he said. The Prestige’s last annual inspection was done in Dubai,.

Soldiers and volunteers were today still cleaning up the beaches between Cape Finisterre north to the city of La Coruna. Dozens of inlets and coves were coated in thick oil while up to 150 animals, mostly seabirds, were taken into care for treatment.

“We’ve seen many dead fish and birds and many others in agony when we rescue them,” Ezequiel Navio, from the World Wildlife Fund.

The government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar was quick to order the Prestige out of Spanish waters after last Wednesday’s leak, and adamantly refused to let it enter any Spanish port for repairs or off-loading. Nor would Portugal, for the same safety reasons.