Lisa Abend: The BP Spill ... Learning from Spain's 2002 Disaster
[Lisa Abend is Spain Correspondent at Time magazine.]
In Muxía, they say black stains still occasionally emerge on the white sands of the local beach. But otherwise, nearly eight years after the Prestige tanker broke apart off the coast of this town in northwestern Spain, spilling 66,000 tons of oil, there are few visible signs of damage. Aquatic species have recovered, and the fears of economic collapse in this fishing town dissipated long ago. What remains instead, say those who lived through the disaster, is the memory of their own power.
As an estimated 40,000 barrels of oil continue to gush daily into the Gulf of Mexico, BP's Deep Horizon spill threatens to pose exponentially graver problems than the Prestige ever did. But in Muxía, which was ground zero for the worst environmental disaster in Spain's history, the townspeople can't help noticing the similarities. "I feel for all those people in the Gulf, because I know what they're going to go through," says Nacho Castro, manager of Muxía's fishermen's association. "It's like living through a war."
In the Prestige's case, that war began with an indecisiveness sure to sound familiar to any Gulf Coast resident. When on Nov. 13, 2002, the Prestige, a Greek-owned ship flying under a Bahamian flag, sprang a leak in its hull after being caught in a storm off the coast of the Galicia region, the governments of Spain, France and Portugal all refused to allow the ship to go to harbor. Instead, Spanish authorities eventually ordered the tanker towed further out to sea, where it split in half and sank. The crew was rescued, but by then thick globs of oil had begun to wash ashore, coating fish and birds as well as the area's rocky beaches.
"I knew immediately that something had happened because I could smell the oil from my house," recalls fisherman José Ramón Vilela. "In that moment, I thought our whole way of life was going to disappear." Six days after the accident, the government banned fishing in the area, a potentially devastating blow to a region that supplies 40% of Spain's total catch. The environmental damage was no less dramatic: the WWF estimates that 250,000 aquatic birds were killed and the populations of a numbers of marine species, such as octopus and goose barnacles, were greatly diminished in the immediate aftermath of the spill.
But something extraordinary happened in the wake of the accident. Outraged by the authorities' attempts to downplay the extent of the catastrophe (which would eventually affect 620 miles of coastline), Muxía and other towns began to fight back. Castro, the fishermen's association manager, and other town leaders wrote to the media and to people at universities across the country, asking for help. "It was a chain reaction," Castro recalls. "People forwarded the messages, and within days, we had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers showing up to clean the beaches."
Over the course of the next nine months, more than 100,000 volunteers from all over Spain traveled to the affected zones to don protective clothes and spend all day scraping oil into buckets for removal from the beaches. The massive, spontaneous response forced the government's hand, and the army was eventually sent in to transport volunteers and carry out the more technically challenging parts of the cleanup...
Read entire article at TIME
In Muxía, they say black stains still occasionally emerge on the white sands of the local beach. But otherwise, nearly eight years after the Prestige tanker broke apart off the coast of this town in northwestern Spain, spilling 66,000 tons of oil, there are few visible signs of damage. Aquatic species have recovered, and the fears of economic collapse in this fishing town dissipated long ago. What remains instead, say those who lived through the disaster, is the memory of their own power.
As an estimated 40,000 barrels of oil continue to gush daily into the Gulf of Mexico, BP's Deep Horizon spill threatens to pose exponentially graver problems than the Prestige ever did. But in Muxía, which was ground zero for the worst environmental disaster in Spain's history, the townspeople can't help noticing the similarities. "I feel for all those people in the Gulf, because I know what they're going to go through," says Nacho Castro, manager of Muxía's fishermen's association. "It's like living through a war."
In the Prestige's case, that war began with an indecisiveness sure to sound familiar to any Gulf Coast resident. When on Nov. 13, 2002, the Prestige, a Greek-owned ship flying under a Bahamian flag, sprang a leak in its hull after being caught in a storm off the coast of the Galicia region, the governments of Spain, France and Portugal all refused to allow the ship to go to harbor. Instead, Spanish authorities eventually ordered the tanker towed further out to sea, where it split in half and sank. The crew was rescued, but by then thick globs of oil had begun to wash ashore, coating fish and birds as well as the area's rocky beaches.
"I knew immediately that something had happened because I could smell the oil from my house," recalls fisherman José Ramón Vilela. "In that moment, I thought our whole way of life was going to disappear." Six days after the accident, the government banned fishing in the area, a potentially devastating blow to a region that supplies 40% of Spain's total catch. The environmental damage was no less dramatic: the WWF estimates that 250,000 aquatic birds were killed and the populations of a numbers of marine species, such as octopus and goose barnacles, were greatly diminished in the immediate aftermath of the spill.
But something extraordinary happened in the wake of the accident. Outraged by the authorities' attempts to downplay the extent of the catastrophe (which would eventually affect 620 miles of coastline), Muxía and other towns began to fight back. Castro, the fishermen's association manager, and other town leaders wrote to the media and to people at universities across the country, asking for help. "It was a chain reaction," Castro recalls. "People forwarded the messages, and within days, we had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers showing up to clean the beaches."
Over the course of the next nine months, more than 100,000 volunteers from all over Spain traveled to the affected zones to don protective clothes and spend all day scraping oil into buckets for removal from the beaches. The massive, spontaneous response forced the government's hand, and the army was eventually sent in to transport volunteers and carry out the more technically challenging parts of the cleanup...