Oil Spill Imperils French Beaches
January 3, 2003
The first beaches have been closed along France’s Atlantic Coast as cleaning brigades start the fight against oil leaking from the tanker Prestige that sunk off of Spain’s northwestern coast six weeks ago. Lumps of oil the size of bricks washed onto land from the stunning rocky beaches of Biarritz to La Rochelle on Thursday.
Wanted: unknown
As the catastrophe began to strike, French prosecutors launched criminal proceedings against those responsible for the spill on Thursday. A statement from French President Jacques Chirac’s office declared that “those responsible, whether owners or crew members, must be located and called to account.”
“One can say for sure that the French coast will be badly affected,” Christophe Rousseau of the marine research center Cedre predicted. It is just a questions of days before bigger oil slicks press forward, he told the German news agency dpa.
The French government started preparing for an environmental catastrophe in early December. Since then marines have been tracking the oil’s movements from the air, night and day. Trawlers and clean-up vessels have been sent out to skim the oil off the surface of the water using special nets.
Experts expect the first large oil slick to reach France’s beaches over the weekend. The French clean-up effort will then have to begin in earnest -- weather permitting. Winds of up to 100 kilometers per hour (62 mph) and five meter (16 feet) high waves have hindered the clean-up in recent weeks of the coast of Spain.
EU aid for Spain
The oil spill has already devastated hundreds of kilometers of Spanish coastline in the Galicia region. Spain's minister for fisheries and agriculture, Miguel Arias Canete, announced on Thursday his country would receive €140 million ($145 million) from the European Union in order to deal with the oil spill and its sweeping and tragic consequences.
Since the Bahamas-registered Prestige broke into two on Nov. 19, at least 20,000 metric tons of oil have leaked into the ocean. The environmental disaster has robbed thousands of people in the fisheries industry of their jobs.