Capitalist anarchy
Worst oil disaster ravages Galicia
By Heather Cottin
The thick sludge rolls in with every tide. Black, viscous
oil coats golden beaches and 90 beautiful harbors of the
Galician coast in northwest Spain. The Nov. 19 sinking of the
oil tanker Prestige has created an environmental and human
disaster.
According to the Nov. 22 Environmental News, this disaster
dwarfs the ecological devastation created when the Exxon Valdez
sank off the Alaskan coast in 1989.
The river valleys of Galicia's spectacular Rias Bajas host a
fishing industry employing tens of thousands of people. The
area is famous for its high-quality lobster, mussels, octopus,
crab and shrimp. Fish and shellfish are the basis of the local
economy. Tourism runs a close second. One fisher told the Los
Angeles Times: ''Our people live out of the sea. What will
happen in the summer? The tourists won't come. No seafood, no
tourists." (Nov. 24)
The livelihoods of 80 percent of Galicia's people are linked
to the ocean. Those fishers put out more boats than the rest of
the European Union fleet put together. The catch in December
makes or breaks Galician fishers.
There will be no December catch.
The Spanish government has promised compensation that would
amount to one-third of what the fishers would have made this
holiday season. Ten years ago, when the tanker Aegean Sea
leaked oil in the same area, Madrid also promised to pay. The
money never came.
Poverty and a prolonged fishing crisis has already
depopulated Galicia's coast. The outlook today is as grim as
the muck washing up on the 250-mile long shoreline.
Fishing along the Galician coast has been suspended
indefinitely. The devastation is almost complete.
"We've seen many dead fish and birds and many others in
agony when we rescue them," said Ezequiel Navio of the World
Wildlife Fund.
In the hardest-hit areas, lines of somber fishers and their
unhappy spouses shovel reeking globs of oil from the shellfish
beds. Then the next tide oozes in, covering the shoals
again.
Propelled by winds blowing up to 70 miles per hour, the oil
spill will befoul the coasts of Spain, Portugal, France, and
possibly even Britain.
Denials and destruction
The Prestige was a 26-year-old single-hull vessel built in
Japan. According to its Danish pilot, Jens Jorgen Thuesen, the
tanker was "not seaworthy. ... The ship should not have been
allowed to sail. It was [only] good for ... the scrap yard."
(Reuters, Nov. 22)
Last year the 158 member states of the International
Maritime Organization, a United Nations body, agreed to phase
out most single-hull oil tankers by 2015. But there are dozens
of old single-hull tankers plying the oceans like floating time
bombs.
There was time--and the conditions--to transfer the cargo to
another ship and avoid this problem,' says Luis Suarez of the
Worldwide Fund for Nature. But the Spanish government elected
to tow the ship out into the stormy Atlantic Ocean, thus
contributing to the breakup and sinking of the elderly vessel.
The Spanish government arrested the captain of the Prestige
after the ship sank.
The Prestige, now two miles underwater and 150 miles off the
coast, had 18 million gallons of oil on board. About 1 million
gallons have already leaked out.
Spanish authorities falsely claim that the remaining "oil
inside the ship would solidify in the frigid ocean depths."
Behind the disaster:
the drive for profits
The Prestige, a Liberian vessel, was registered in the
Bahamas. Why? "The operations and income associated with
Bahaman vessels are entirely tax-free." (Observer, Nov. 24)
According to the Observer, Crown Resources, a British company
headquartered in Switzerland, owned the oil and chartered the
ship to carry it.
Moscow business owner Mikhail Fridman, one of the richest
people in the world according to Forbes Magazine, owned the
Prestige. According to the Observer, Fridman runs one of
Russia's biggest conglomerates, which takes in oil exploration,
banking, telecommunications, food, vodka and supermarkets.
Oil industry apologists--reluctant to pay for a costly
cleanup that would involve sucking the remaining oil out of the
leaking tanker--minimize the impact of the disaster. "The
strategy would likely be to leave the oil where it is but
monitor it," said Malcolm L. Spaulding, professor of ocean
engineering at the University of Rhode Island and chair of a
1999 National Research Council study on "Spills of Non-Floating
Oils." Spaulding claimed the oil remaining in the vessel poses
"little or no threat to the environment." (Washington Post,
Nov. 21)
But scientists of the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute
spotted four new oil slicks above the tanker's resting place.
Experts say the oil is leaking, raising fears that the hull is
in danger of bursting under the pressure of more than 1,000
feet of water. If it bursts, it could release a cargo twice as
big as that exuded by the Exxon Valdez.
Even if the cargo stays on the seabed, compressed and turned
into a heavy waxy substance by the cold and extreme pressures,
experts warn that heavy metals will still leach into the water.
"[Toxins will] accumulate, and man is at the end of the food
chain,"said Thilo Maack of Greenpeace.
The anarchy of capitalism and the absence of state planning
for human needs caused this catastrophe. Protected by state
apparatus and international law, the capitalists have poisoned
the earth again. The Prestige oil spill was caused by the
profit-hungry oil corporations--the very forces slithering
toward a war in Iraq.
Angered by the Spanish government's inaction and oil
industry indifference, a thousand Galician fishers formed a
barrier across one river valley with their boats Nov. 21. They
were trying to keep the sludge out of an estuary that provides
their sustenance. They show that the only way to confront the
political and economic forces that are destroying the earth is
to organize.
Reprinted from the Dec. 5, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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