SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain — As a crippled tanker full of about 20 million gallons of gooey fuel oil split in two and sank two miles beneath the seething Atlantic’s surface Tuesday, experts feared the worst: Oil bubbling back to the surface to befoul Spanish and Portuguese shorelines, their fish and wildlife, and maybe even Mediterranean beaches.
Stormy conditions — which broke up the crippled tanker Prestige 150 miles off Spain’s northwestern coast — along with the unusual thickness of the oil and extreme pressure on the ocean floor, threaten the worst oil spill in more than a decade, said the U.S. government’s top oil spill response official.
About 1 million gallons of oil spilled instantly when the ship broke in two, spawning an oil slick of about 2,200 square miles — about twice the size of Rhode Island. Some Spanish beaches already are mired in oil from a spill last week, their sea birds covered in sludge. Fishing, a key industry, has shut down in vicinity of the port of La Coruna, about 370 miles northwest of Madrid.
The aging single-hulled tanker carried more than twice the oil that the Exxon Valdez spilled in Alaska in 1989, but nowhere near 88 million gallons that despoiled Trinidad and Tobago in 1979.
So far, most of the oil remains in Prestige’s tanks in more than 11,000 feet of water and under about 5,000 pounds of pressure per square inch.
The best possible scenario is that the tanks are so full they can’t buckle and their oil remains buried on the sea bottom or dribbles out slowly for years through tiny cracks. Experts fear the tanks will implode and send millions of gallons of fuel oil, which is slightly lighter than water, back to the surface.
Once the oil gets to the surface, “you can’t do any type of clean-up,” said David Kennedy, director of the U.S. National Ocean Service’s Office of Response and Restoration. That’s because the usual oil spill-fighting methods — burning the oil slick or dispersing it with soapy detergent — won’t work against thick fuel oil in heavy seas and 45 mph winds.
Kennedy predicted the slick would hit the Portuguese coast harder than the Spanish coast, then flow through the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean Sea.