Portugal says sunken tanker still leaking oil

The Portuguese navy said yesterday a storm-damaged oil tanker which broke in two and sank off the Spanish coast last week, polluting hundreds of kilometres of coastline, was still leaking fuel oil.

Spain has disputed the Portuguese navy's reports. Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said on Saturday there was only a thin film of oil where the tanker went down.

The Prestige, a 26-year-old, single-hulled tanker, broke up and sank on Tuesday after spilling nearly 11,000 tonnes of fuel oil. Its original 77,000 tonne cargo was twice the amount of oil spilled when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska in 1989, creating an environmental disaster.

Captain Augusto Ezequiel, technical director of the Portuguese navy's Hydrographic Institute, said navy aircraft monitoring the site, about 220 kilometres west of Spain's Galician coast, sighted a slick about three kms long and a few hundred metres wide on Saturday.

"There was leakage detected at the site. It was still coming up at the site where the ship sank," he said, adding the leakage was not steady and might stop when the wreck stabilised.

Ezequiel said a navy aircraft would fly over the site to report on any new leakage.

Portugal's Foreign Minister Antonio Martins da Cruz said he had proposed to Spain that the two countries set up more formal contacts to help prevent more wrecks like that of the Prestige.

"All of us have the idea that in the first hours there were some malfunctions, perhaps because either on one side or the other the technical responsibilities were not well identified," he told private TSF radio.

Martins da Cruz declined to comment on Spain's assertion that there was no new leakage.

The Spanish government says there have been no new signs of oil since the tanker sank and that more than 60,000 tonnes of fuel oil still on board probably turned into a solid mass in the cold Atlantic depths.

The Prestige was holed in a storm off northwestern Spain 11 days ago. Tugs towed it out to sea for five days before it broke into two and sank on Tuesday in seething Atlantic waters.

A Portuguese warship turned back the ship when it tried to enter Portuguese waters. Portugal and Spain also barred the Prestige from their ports.

Oil from the Prestige has led to a ban on fishing along nearly 500 kilometres of Galician coastline, killed or polluted hundreds of seabirds and endangered the area's rich shellfish resources, vital to the region's economy.

Spain stepped up its cleanup efforts yesterday. The number of people cleaning up the sludge coating 136 beaches reached 600 as volunteers were drafted in and will rise to at least 1,000 in the next few days, the government said.

Some 1,245 tonnes of fuel oil have so far been picked up from Spanish beaches, out of the 11,000 tonnes that the government estimates leaked from the Prestige.

A break in the storms that have pounded the Galician coast for several days allowed specialised ships to get to work vacuuming up some of the oil yesterday.

Spanish, French and Dutch cleanup ships were working about 150 kilometres off the Spanish coast, where the slick has broken into about 100 fragments in an area 19 kilometres by 29 kilometres.

Strong winds have been pushing the slick northeast, closer to the Spanish coast.

Ships from Germany, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands are due to join the effort this week. Some 25 kms of floating barriers are in place to try to stop new slicks reaching Spanish shores and that length will nearly double with promised aid from the European Union, officials said.

Spain's Development Ministry said on Saturday there remained a grave risk that the coast could be contaminated by the new slick, but the government said yesterday the risk was diminishing that the slick would hit Portugal or so far untouched areas of southern Galicia.

The newspaper La Opinion, of Spain's La Coruna, quoted a Portuguese study yesterday as saying the slick could reach northern Galicia around November 30 or December 1. La Voz de Galicia said some of the oil could reach France and Britain.

Steady winds from the southwest have kept the oil from Portugal's fishing grounds and coast, whose beaches are a major draw for the 12 million tourists that visit each year.

The sunken tanker has heightened Portuguese unease about Spain, its far bigger neighbour and traditional rival. In an unscientific poll by mobile phone, 97 percent of respondents surveyed by Diario de Noticias newspaper said Spain had mishandled the Prestige crisis.

The Spanish government has come under fire from environmental groups such as Greenpeace for failing to put enough resources into fighting the spill, minimising the extent of the disaster and being late to call in international help.

Rajoy, in charge of cleanup efforts, has rejected the criticism.