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US will help Spain clean up after tanker disaster
Planet Ark
24th January, 2003
The United States will send scientists specialising in oil spills to Spain to advise on repairing the environmental damage wrought by the sunken tanker Prestige, officials said yesterday.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which can draw on its experience of the huge Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, signed a cooperation deal with Spain's Environment Ministry yesterday.
"We are prepared to provide the expertise of scientists who dealt with the Exxon Valdez," the agency's administrator Christine Todd Whitman told a news conference.
"We learnt a great deal about coastal rehabilitation and the best methodology for dealing with the long-term consequences."
The Prestige, which sank off the coast of Galicia with 77,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil on board in November, has contaminated hundreds of kilometres (miles) of Spain's northern coast and forced the closure of its richest fishing grounds.
Oil has also washed up on France's Atlantic beaches and threatened to taint major oyster farms.
Some 50,000 tonnes of oil is still in the wreck - 3.5 kms (2.2 miles) under the sea - and leaking slowly.
Spanish Environment Minister Jaume Matas said beaches in Galicia had largely been cleaned.
Work would start in earnest next week on removing oil from the rocky cliffs with high pressure hoses, using absorbent material and barriers to prevent it running back into the sea - a process that could take six months, he said.
Oil from the Exxon Valdez is still releasing toxins that harm sea life, 14 years after the disaster, a study by the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service said earlier this month.
Spain plans to propose setting up a special United Nations fund for environmental disasters at the U.N. Environment Programme meeting in Nairobi in February, Matas said.
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
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