How EU can prevent another Prestige on seas filled with ‘ecological time bombs’

Date: 05/12/02

By Karen Carstens

The European Commission introduced emergency measures in the wake of the Erika disaster in 2000 to help prevent future spills - but member states have yet to deliver

IF ANYTHING good can come from an environmental catastrophe such as the Prestige oil spill, it is a renewed focus on what needs to be done to improve maritime safety.

The Liberian-owned, Bahamas-registered Prestige tanker sank 250 kilometres off Spain's north-eastern coast on 19 November. It was carrying 77,000 tonnes of industrial fuel - twice as much oil as the Exxon Valdez, which caused one of the world's worst environmental disasters when it ran aground after trying to avoid icebergs off Alaska in 1989.

As this paper went to press, a French mini-submarine was surveying the wreck of the Prestige and a second major slick was starting to wash up on the Galician shoreline north of Cape Finisterre, where thousands of sea birds have died.

Although the European Commission has introduced measures to help prevent future oil spills, environmental groups such as Seas at Risk and BirdLife International say more needs to be done.

On Tuesday (3 December), the Commission published a blacklist of 66 dangerous ships that should not be allowed to enter EU waters. The list, which is not comprehensive, includes 26 ships sailing under the Turkish flag, 12 under the Carribean flag and nine under the Cambodian flag.

Loyola de Palacio, the Spanish-born commissioner for transport and energy , called on EU leaders to react to the new measure at the Copenhagen summit next week.

Moreover, de Palacio addressed the 23-member administrative board of the new European Maritime Safety Agency at its first meeting on Wednesday (4 December). It was held in provisional quarters in Brussels, as member states have yet to agree on the body's location (two candidates are Nantes and Lisbon).

'It is tragic that another accident has happened just as we are introducing this new agency,' she said. 'This is not the end of our fight for better and safer marine transport.'

After the Prestige disaster, she urged member states to speed up the implementation of two sets of measures agreed in 2000 following the Erika tanker spill off the Brittany coast in December 1999.

The Erika I and Erika II rules aim, among other things, to toughen up port inspections and gradually phase out single-hull tankers like the Prestige - encouraging their replacement by safer, double-hull versions.

EU governments have, at least, agreed to phase out single-hull vessels by 2015, and have also set limits for the age of vessels plying their territorial waters.

Moreover, Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar and French President Jacques Chirac agreed last week to increase inspections of single-hulled vessels more than 15 years old navigating within 200 nautical miles of their respective coastlines.

The initiative also allows the two countries to expel non-cooperating vessels from their national waters. Italy and Portugal look set to join Spain and France in pushing for such measures whenn EU leaders discuss maritime safety in Copenhagen.

But Denmark, the current holder of the rotating EU presidency, and the UK prefer regulating their maritime sectors via international agreements overseen by the London-based International Maritime Organisation. And so the gridlock looks set to continue.

De Palacio had earlier said that if the Erika measures had already been implemented by member states, the 26-year-old Prestige 'would have been subject to rigorous inspection' last summer.

Still, many environmentalists claim the Commission proposals are not far-reaching enough to prevent future disasters and fail to address the day-to-day pollution damage caused by shipping.

Six non-governmental organisations that focus on transport-related issues - the European Federation for Transport and Environment, European Environmental Bureau, Swedish NGO Secretariat on Acid Rain, Friends of Nature International, Seas at Risk and the Climate Action Network - have written to de Palacio calling for more stringent maritime safety measures.

They accuse the transport and energy DG of promoting shipping 'as an environmentally sound mode of transport' and envisioning dangerously unregulated 'motorways of the sea'.

They say legislation needs to move beyond Erika I and II: 'If the EU wants motorways of the sea it has to introduce a sort of road-pricing in EU waters and make sure that vessels like the Prestige with their hazardous trade never make it onto the on-ramp.'

According to Jörg Beckmann, a policy officer at the European Federation for Transport and Environment, a framework directive on 'infrastructure charging' has been languishing on de Palacio's desk for months.

'What we need within the transport sector is some sort of framework that ensures all external costs are internalised,' he said.

Such costs include damage done by, for example, sulphur dioxide emissions from ships or the degradation of urban and rural landscapes from roads and railways.

Environmentalists are also pushing for a directive on environmental liability proposed by the Commission in February to finally be adopted.

'We hope that by the end of next year we will have something better for the 'polluter pays' principle,' said Roberto Ferrigno, EU policy director at the European Environmental Bureau.

In 1992, the US banned single-hull tankers from approaching its coastline. 'If you look at the US record since then, there have been no major oil spills,' he said. 'We don't see why the EU has not done something similar.'

Meanwhile, scientists estimate that some 60,000 tonnes of oil remain trapped inside the hull of the Prestige.

'We are in a new century, we are no longer in the time of beautiful boats and pirates when we were just taken everywhere by the wind,' said de Palacio's spokesman Gilles Gantelet.

'We've got big traffic with polluting products. These are ecological time bombs.'

Major feature. The European Commission introduced emergency measures in the wake of the Erika disaster in 2000 to help prevent future spills - but Member States have yet to deliver.