An aging tanker loaded with Russian fuel oil split in two and sank in the Atlantic Ocean six days after several countries, fearful for their coasts, refused to allow the leaking vessel to dock for repairs.
As fuel oil coated beaches along a 125-mile stretch of coastline in the Spanish fishing region of Galicia, covering birds and other wildlife in sludge, European governments called for stricter regulation of international shipping. They also pointed fingers at one another for failing to prevent the disaster.
"Everyone is trying to blame everyone for this," a spokesman for the office of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said.
The Portuguese Navy sent crews, skimmers and other equipment to try to contain a slick at sea that was more than 20 miles long and 550 yards wide. Authorities weren't certain how much fuel oil had spilled.
The tanker Prestige -- flying a Bahamian flag and owned by a Liberian company based in Athens -- was carrying about 24 million gallons when it sprang a leak about 30 miles off the northwest coasts of Spain and Portugal last week. Adrift and denied permission to pull into nearby ports, the Prestige was towed further out to sea. It broke in half Tuesday and sank about 155 miles from shore.
Built in 1976, the Prestige is one of the older members of the world's tanker fleet. It has only a single hull; new tankers are required to have double hulls, which can help prevent leaks. The International Maritime Organization has ordered that all single-hull vessels be phased out by 2015.
The ports that refused to allow the ship to dock were in Spain, Portugal, France and the U.K., according to SMIT Salvage NV, a Dutch salvage company hired by one of the Prestige's insurers, Lloyd's of London, to tow the vessel to safety.
"This was an understandable mistake on their part," said Lars Walder, a spokesman for SMIT Salvage, a unit of SMIT International NV. "Nobody wanted a leaking tanker."
Charlotte de Fontaubert, oceans campaign coordinator in the U.S. for Greenpeace, the environmental group, said getting the boat into deep water made sense at the time. "There's an argument that says the solution to pollution is dilution," she said.
In 1989, the Exxon Valdez dumped 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine Prince William Sound in Alaska. If all the fuel oil in the Prestige's hold were to leak out, it would be "an unprecedented disaster," said Maria Jose Caballeros of Greenpeace in Spain. But Prestige and its remaining cargo sank to a depth of about 12,000 feet, where the frigid water could turn the fuel oil in the hold into a solid mass, preventing any more from escaping.
The tanker's breakup sparked calls for tougher regulation of ships, particularly those that fly "flags of convenience," meaning they are registered in countries that don't have the strictest codes.
The Spanish government blamed the sloppiness of officials in the U.K. territory of Gibraltar, where Spain claimed that the Prestige had recently refueled several times but had not been inspected as required by EU law. The U.K. and Gibraltar governments denied the allegation. The Spanish Coast Guard arrested the Prestige's captain, a Greek national, and charged him with causing damage to the environment.
The European Union wrote new maritime-safety regulations after the 1999 sinking of the oil tanker Erika, which polluted 250 miles of French coastline. But EU members aren't required to begin enforcing the regulations until July. Those regulations will require a ship like the Prestige to be inspected annually by national authorities, and will ban ships as old as the Prestige in 2005. Current law requires EU countries to inspect at least 25% of all ships that anchor in their waters.
The cargo on the Prestige was owned by Crown Resources AG, a Switzerland-based commodity trading unit of the Russian conglomerate Alfa Group. The fuel oil was loaded onto the Prestige in St. Petersburg and was bound for Singapore, Crown said. Crown said a buyer for the oil hadn't been lined up.
The Spanish merchant-marine service said it tried and failed to communicate with the Prestige after receiving a mayday call on Nov. 13. The service said that when Spanish ships sailed out to the Prestige the following day, the captain refused to cooperate with a rescue effort. The salvage company's tugboat towed the tanker out to deeper waters on Nov. 15 after the Spanish refused to allow the Prestige to dock at the Galician port of Vigo.
The ship's liability insurer is the London Steamship Owners' Mutual Association. Such organizations, known as protection and indemnity -- or P&I -- clubs, are common in the shipping industry. They insure 92% of the world's shipping, in part because the high-dollar, high-risk coverage for shipping frequently is difficult to find in the commercial-insurance market. The London P&I club collects premiums every year from its members, then pools its risks with other P&I clubs around the world.
The London P&I club does purchase coverage from commercial insurers for high-dollar losses, including syndicates of Lloyd's of London, according to Paul Hinton, chief executive of A. Bilbrough & Co., the company that manages the London P&I's insurance program. Mr. Hinton, who declined to say how much coverage was provided by the London P&I or its reinsurers, said that it is difficult to estimate how much the reinsurers would end up paying in losses related to the sinking.
-- Thaddeus Herrick, Christopher Oster and Michael Scheerer contributed to this article.
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