World News 20-11-2002 Greenpeace: `A Timebomb At The Bottom Of The Sea` who: Prime minister José María Aznar what: Vows to hunt down those responsible for catastrophic oil tanker disaster where: Madrid, Spain when: Yesterday snippet: "Most of the Prestige`s 77,000-ton (20 million-gallon) cargo of fuel oil - twice as much as the 1989 Exxon-Valdez spill off Alaska is believed to have gone down with it," says The Independent as the sunken oil tanker continued to spew oil 130 miles off Spain`s north-west cost. "But the age of the vessel means it is only a matter of time before a second massive slick, about nine times the size of the first, seeps out." With fishing suspended along the coast of Spain, it looks like fishermen will bear the greatest economic cost of this disaster, suggests The Telegraph, which quotes WWF`s Sian Pullen: "It`s already a huge disaster", she said - "4,500 fishermen are out of work, oil is coming on to beaches. This will also be one of the worst in terms of its impact." Britain moved swiftly to reject claims by the Spanish government that it should take responsiblity for the incident as the ship "called frequently at Gibraltar and should have been thoroughly inspected by local port authorities." The British Government accused Spain of not checking its facts, adding that as the Prestige plied her trade between the Baltic and the Far East over recent months, "she had put into many EU ports, including Algeciras and Las Palmas in Spain. She also called at Dunkirk, Wilhelmshaven, Cork, Rotterdam and Kalamata, as well as other ports in Latvia, the Gulf and Singapore." Environmental groups hold out hope that, like the Braer spill in 1993, the effects may be less catastrophic than is currently being predicted. "The Braer oil tanker spilt 85,000 tons in the biggest spill of the past decade. But it had a light crude that dispersed far more quickly than doom-mongers predicted," explains a relatively optimistic Telegraph. "Some 6,000 sea birds perished within weeks but only one of the island`s 800 otters died and that was run over by a film crew`s Volvo." [... more]

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