Prestige Accident

All 27 crew members of the Prestige were evacuated safely. On November 19,2002, the oil tanker broke into two and sank about 133 nautical miles off the coast of Spain. The incident seriously polluted the Spanish coast with oil, and subsequently the European Union (EU) banned single-hull tankers car-r3nng heavy oil from all EU ports [17]. 

The Herald of Free Enterprise accident is concerned with a passenger ship called the Herald of Free Enterprise. The ship left Zeebrugge Harbour, 

Belgium, on March 6, 1987, and only four minutes after departure, it capsized and resulted in at least 150 passenger and 38 crew member fatalities [17, 20]. The capsizing of the ship was caused by a combination of adverse factors, including the trim by the bow, the vessel speed, and the bow door being left open. 

The public inquiry into the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster was an important milestone in ship safety in the United Kingdom. It resulted in actions such as changes to marine safety-related rules and regulations, the introduction of the International Safety Management (ISM) Code for the safe operation of ships and for pollution prevention, and the development of a formal safety assessment process in the shipping industrial sector [17]. 

This accident occurred on November 13, 2002 when an oil tanker named Prestige carrying 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil suffered hull damage in heavy seas off the northern part of Spain [33-35]. The vessel broke into two sections, about 170 miles west of Vigo, Spain, on November 19,2002 and then sank in water 2 miles deep. Approximately 63,000 tons of heavy fuel oil was released into the sea from the tanker. 

The released oil drifted for an extended period with winds and currents, and affected as far as the north coast of Spain and the Atlantic Coast of France. Approximately 141,000 tons of oil-related waste was collected in Spain and about 18,300 tons in France. 

Additional information on this accident is available in References 33 through 35. 

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Distribution of the interpreted images by DG-ENV, as annex to Infosheets on the Prestige accident, to all Member States. 

Fig. 2. First satellite image interpretation produced at the JRC for the Prestige accident...

Integration of data from different space borne sensors to improve the retrieval of oil spill thickness, the detection of submersed oil, and the type of the oil. These aspects are particularly important when heavy oil is discharged, as in the case of the Erika and Prestige accidents. In order to estimate the volume and the type of the discharged oil it is essential to assess the impact on the environment. 

Espedal H A and Wahl T (1999) Satellite SAR oil spill detection using wind speed history information. Int J Remote Sensing 20 49-65 Fortuny J, Tarchi D, Ferraro G and Sieber A (2004) The Use of Satellite Radar Imagery in the Prestige Accident, paper submitted to Interspill 2004, 14-17 June, Trondheim, Norway... 

Consequence The direct undesirable result of an accident sequence usually involving a fire, explosion, release of toxic material. Consequence descriptions may include estimates of the effects of an accident in terms of factors such as health impacts, physical destruction, environmental damage, business interruption and public reaction or company prestige. 

Some examples of disastrous oil spills include the following accidents involving oceanic supertankers (1) the Prestige, which split in half off Galicia, Spain in November 2002, spilling about 67,000 tons (61,000 metric... 

This spill off the coast of Alaska generated the most media attention in the United States of any spill anywhere in the world. It also led to the most comprehensive scientific investigation of such incidents although much less oil was spilled than in many other tanker accidents. For example, the Exxon Valdez spilled only one-sixth as much oil as the Amoco Cadiz and about one-half as much as the Prestige. It is estimated that the Amoco Cadiz spilled 220 000 tons of oil, probably the largest amount spilled by a tanker in history. 

Support response operations in case of maritime accidents (see as an example the Prestige case) ... 

Right after the accident of the Prestige tanker, the Monitoring and Information Centre of the European Commission, in coordination with the... 

On behalf of the Directorate General Environment (DG ENV), the Joint Research Centre provided support to the interpretation of radar satellite images over the areas affected by the Prestige Tanker accident (Atlantic Coast of Galicia, Cantabrian Coast and the Bay of Biscay). In support of the operational phase, the following working scheme was adopted ... 

The Prestige Tanker accident has been characterised by a number of peculiar aspects, most of them previously not encountered or even unknown. They basically concern the type of discharged oil, the amount of discharged oil, the extent of the affected area, the time period of persistence of oil at sea, as well as the mutual interactions between them. 

National Transportation Safety Board, Collision of Norfolk Southern Freight Train 192 with Standing Norfolk Southern Local Train P22 With Subsequent Hazardous Materials Release at Graniteville, South Carolina, January 6, 2005, Railroad Accident Report, NTSB/RAR-05/04, 2005 VROM Inspectorate, 2005 Annual Report, The Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial Plaiming and the Environment, 2006 Wadsworth, T., Evaluation of the Response by Specialized Foreign Vessels to the Release of Oil From Prestige. ITOPF Ltd., 2005... 

It is tempting to try to draw the conclusion that a penny-pinching attitude was at least a factor in both accidents. For Texas City, maintenance cuts were evident, and the operating budget had been reduced by 25% after BP took over Amoco. For Deepwater Horizon, Macondo was a high-profile prestige project, and the cost and program overruns for Macondo development will have received corporate-level attention. 

Some of the costs, such as loss of prestige, or costs of human lives are much more difficult to evaluate monetarily, though some states in the U.S. have set up limitations to the amount of money a victim s dependent can be awarded, if someone else is held liable for his/her death in an accident. Current maximum liability for a passenger on an international airline is restricted by the Warsaw Convention to 75.000 per person. Awards made by the courts are computed in a variety of ways. One method is based on the total income that a victim could have earned had he lived up to his full normal life expectancy. Another method is that organizations often calculate the functional value of the lost member in terms of the capacity for which he/she must be replaced. The U.S. military forces each year update their lists of monetary values for military personnel that are scaled according to function and rank. 

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