Towns along France’s Atlantic coast readied on Thursday to battle an approaching oil slick, putting together a plan for action should the fuel wash ashore.
The oil, spilled when the tanker Prestige was damaged and sank last month, was 220 kilometers (135 miles) off the coast of France on Thursday. It was uncertain, however, whether the oil would reach the shore.
“I hope that the pollution never arrives and that this meeting will be useless, but we have to get ourselves ready,” said Roger Parent, a regional official in charge of security.
Parent led a meeting of leaders from 57 towns near Lacanau, about 500 kilometers southwest of Paris, to discuss how the communities should get ready. He urged towns to start early next week at the latest to prepare materials such as buckets and gloves for a possible cleanup.
Parent said the slicks headed toward France would be much smaller than those that hit the Spanish northwestern coast, where gobs of oil killed birds and fouled long strips of beaches.
France on Wednesday announced it would dispatch more surveillance airplanes to measure the slicks, joining other planes and a research submarine.
The Bahamas-flagged Prestige leaked oil from Nov. 13, when its hull ruptured in a storm, through Nov. 19, when it broke in half and sank. An estimated 20,000 tons (5.3 million gallons) spilled. The rest, about 57,000 tons, sank with the Prestige.
To help prevent future oil spills, France said Wednesday it will start inspecting all the aging single-hulled oil tankers that enter its ports.
The first such ship had already been turned away on Tuesday, when a French warship forced the 24-year-old Maltese-flagged Enalios-Titan out of French waters. The ship then headed toward the Straits of Gibraltar on its way to Singapore.
The Enalios-Titan is a single-hull tanker similar to the Prestige.
Joining Spain, France and Portugal, Morocco has also tightened procedures for oil tankers passing through its waters, the government announced on Thursday.
The measure was aimed at all single-hulled tankers more than 15-years-old. It was unclear whether that would stop the Enalios-Titan from passing through Gibraltar.
By Pierre Sauvey, AP
