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President Obama will speak to the nation from the Oval Office tonight about the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The White House says Mr. Obama will outline his plan to contain the environmental disaster and hold oil giant BP responsible. Eight years ago, millions of gallons of oil smothered the northwest coast of Spain. Fishing stocks have rebounded now, but as Gerry Hadden reports, no one is sure of the long-term health effects.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. The region will recover and thrive again. That’s the message President Obama delivered to Gulf Coast residents today as he wrapped up his latest visit there. It was a message of reassurance even as the oil disaster offshore continues largely unabated. No one knows whether the President can deliver on his promise. Every oil spill is different. But some clues to the future may be found in what’s happened elsewhere in the past. Today The World’s Gerry Hadden reports on the mixed legacy of another oil disaster off of Spain’s northwestern coast..
GERRY HADDEN: Half a mile off the coast of the Galician village of Lira, huge Atlantic waves pound a rocky shoal. At low tide fisherman rush out here to scrape valuable gooseneck barnacles off the exposed rocks. When the tide roars back, they hustle into their boats and head for port. It’s dangerous work, fishing boats wrecks are common in these waters. But Galicia’s most infamous wreck came in November 2002 when the Greek operated Prestige oil tanker split in two in heavy seas 150 miles off shore. It dumped nearly 20 million gallons of heavy fuel oil. Retired fisherman Paco Haz remembers the day the oil began washing ashore.
INTERPRETER: It made you want to cry. It was like death itself. It was black, not like the slick over there in the Gulf of Mexico. What we had was like pure asphalt. In some places along the shore it was almost seven feet deep.
HADDEN: The spill was widely seen as Spain’s worst environmental disaster. It grounded fishing fleets along hundreds of miles of coastline for nearly a year. And yet eight years later what felt like the end of the world for people here seems not to have been. Haz says the region has largely recovered.
INTERPRETER: The shellfish came back very quickly. If the slick had entered into the shallow channels it would have been a disaster. But luckily it came ashore here where it’s rocky and the sea is rough.
HADDEN: Galicia’s rough seas pulverized much of the oil. The thousands of volunteers who came to shovel and scrub away the petroleum helped as well. The rocky coastline, the sea, and the fish and shellfish stocks seem to be back to normal. In fact, some people say the spill brought unexpected benefits for Galicia. Curious tourists began showing up and spending money. Millions of dollars in aid poured in as well. And to some here, the disaster was an awful but long needed wake up call for the local fishing industry. Twenty-six-year-old Jose Antonio Jacomayo is president of the local fisherman’s guild. Before the spill there were too many boats, he says. We were over-exploiting the sea. With the Prestige, people began to realize we had to change our mentality. The fishing industry here is smaller now, but those who stayed say they’re doing better and that they’re taking better care of their resources. In a first ever experiment in Spain, the fishermen of Lira have become the stewards of their own tiny corner of the sea. Among other things, they’ve established a marine reserve in which fishing is banned. The idea is to give marine life a breeding sanctuary. Jacomayo says the effort is paying off. He says for squid I used to go out two or three miles to fill my nets. Now I can stay around the reserve and catch the same. So I save money in fuel and I have to fish less. But not all current and former residents share the rosy outlook. Many sold their boats and moved away after the spill. And while many of the species have rebounded, some of the markets have not. In a dockside warehouse in Muros, an auctioneer calls out prices for barnacles, razor clams and dozens of fish species. The longer he barks, the lower the prices go. One fisherman who didn’t want to give his name says he’s earning much less than he did 10 years ago. It’s a common problem after big oil spills. During even a short term fishing ban other suppliers step in to fill the gap and that can lead to a long term loss of market share. There are also concerns about the lingering environmental and health impacts of the Prestige spill. It’s true that the apparent effects of the toxic oil are long gone, but Nacho Castro with the Fisherman’s Guild in the village of Muxia says that doesn’t mean the danger has disappeared. Chemicals don’t kill right away Castro says. With an oil spill some animals die because they suffocate or can’t eat, but that’s minimal. The real danger is the chemicals that enter our bodies. In the long term they can provoke cancers or who knows what else. Much of what is known about the lingering effects of oil in a coastal environment comes from research still going on into the effects of the Exxon Valdez spill more than 20 years ago. There, researchers have found that the oil and its environmental impact can persist for decades. Here in Galicia though, there has been little tracking of the long term effects of the Prestige spill because initial studies were cut short. Raul Garcia is with the World Wildlife fund, or WWF.
RAUL GARCIA: So the scientists, they got a lot of money in the first year. Some of them choose the money to investigate but on their issue of concern maybe nothing to do with the oil spill. So it was very difficult to really have a long term idea of the effects.\
HADDEN: Garcia says WWF divers still find large amounts of oil in the sea bed beneath the sand. But he says politicians turned off the research taps once media attention turned away from the region. But others say the decision was based on the research that was done early on. Marine stocks rebounded so quickly they say, that long term studies were deemed unnecessary. Jose Antonio Neira is a marine biologist in the port of Lira. The Prestige is considered over he says. It’s not that we’ve deliberately decided not to talk about it, but we don’t see a need because we don’t consider that there are any lasting effects. But Nacho Castro of the Muxia fisherman’s guild says you can’t conclude there are no long term effects of an oil spill if you stop looking for them. For The World, I’m Gerry Hadden, Galicia, Spain.
WERMAN: You can see a video on life in the spill zone along the Galician shore at the world dot org.
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