Why aging oil tankers still ply the seas

Fifteen hundred fathoms beneath the storm-tossed Atlantic waves an environmental time bomb is threatening Spanish beaches and fishing grounds, but nobody knows who is really to blame.

The wreck of the Prestige, the tanker that sank Tuesday with more than twice as much oil aboard as leaked from the Exxon Valdez, has raised an outcry in Europe about the use of aging rust buckets to carry toxic cargo. It has also highlighted how hard it is to assign responsibility for what could turn into one of the world's worst oil-spill disasters ever, and thus decide who should pay to clean it up.

The 26-year-old Japanese-built ship was owned by a company registered in Liberia, managed by a Greek firm, registered in the Bahamas, certified by an American organization, chartered by a Swiss-based Russian trading company, and carrying oil from Latvia to Singapore.

By Wednesday, the Prestige had leaked some 10,000 tons of fuel oil, blackening 50 miles of beaches in the Western Spanish province of Galicia and closing rich fishing grounds. Experts were divided over whether and when the 70,000 tons remaining in the vessel's hold would leak.

The accident has been felt acutely across Europe, where oil spills have polluted coastlines year after year. European Union officials are urging governments to speed up implementation of strict new marine safety rules, due to go into effect next year, and to go beyond those regulations.

"There is nothing to stop [EU] member states from expelling substandard vessels from their waters, if they had the political will," said Francois Lamoureux, director general of the EU's transport division.

The unexplained rupture in the tanker's side, which opened up in heavy weather last week, has also drawn attention to the way in which many flag countries - in this case the Bahamas - delegate their inspection responsibilities to private companies.

"So long as these companies continue to issue certification in exchange for a check to what are objectively dustbin ships, what can you expect?" complained Jo Le Guen, a French campaigner against maritime pollution.

The American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), a nonprofit classification society that says it surveyed the Prestige annually, rejects that accusation. The vessel underwent "extensive repairs, extensive steel replacement ... including the replacement of two bulkheads" during a special survey in dry dock in China in May 2001, according to ABS spokesman Stewart Wade. Those repairs and others "brought the ship back into conformity with our requirements," Mr. Wade said, adding that only minor problems were found during a routine annual survey in Dubai last May. "We have no indication of what may have failed if anything did."

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