Oil 'can and will' spill
By Patrick Blum International Herald Tribune
Published: September 11, 2006
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
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Oil 'can and will' spill
By Patrick Blum International Herald Tribune
Published: September 11, 2006
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers around Britain's coasts. British coastal authorities counted 16 such transfers last year, compared with five in 2003.
With more than 20,000 commercial ships in European waters at any given time, it is hard to track cargoes, safety records and destinations and to exchange information between often incompatible national and local systems.
To harmonize this data, the maritime safety agency is helping to develop a European traffic control and information system for the entire EU coast, plus that of Norway, which is not an EU member.
Work started two years ago and the network should be completed in 2008, improving accident response capabilities in seas lanes that, according to United Nations trade data, carry about a third of the world's sea-borne cargoes, and 40 percent of oil and oil product cargoes.
The agency is also working to overcome the shipping industry's lack of transparency, which critics say is designed to obscure responsibility.
The Prestige, for example, a rickety 26-year-old single-hull tanker, was owned by a Liberian company that belonged to a Greek shipping family, and sailed under a flag of convenience from the Bahamas.
The oil cargo belonged to a Russian company based in Switzerland that operated through a British shipping agent.
"People said this cannot continue," de Ruiter said. "New rules are needed. This sector is not healthy."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
EU governments have since agreed on a timetable for phasing out single- hull tankers and replacing them with safer double-hull vessels by 2010. They have also introduced clearer rules on responsibility, tightened port supervision and imposed stricter inspection and safety standards.
Still, one issue remains unresolved: Should a severely damaged ship be allowed into port or sent away?
Before it sank, the Prestige was towed 140 nautical miles, or 260 kilometers, out to sea, after losing power and starting to leak when only 30 miles from the Spanish coast. Environmentalists say towing the stricken tanker into the Atlantic vastly extended the shoreline at risk from fouling when it broke apart.
"Should the Prestige have been taken into port and maintained and inspected?" asked Walmsley, who was involved in the WWF response to the disaster. "Would that have made things better?"
"I think it would have minimized the damage."
The problem is that nobody wants a damaged ship with a hazardous cargo coming into the port next door.
"It remains a difficult issue," said de Ruiter. "Who decides on sink or shelter? It has to be a coastal authority. You cannot give an absolute right to the master of a ship in distress to decide which port to enter."
Preparing for the worst, de Ruiter in December signed contracts with seven part-time oil recovery ships - five in the Baltic and one each in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean - to back up national fleets, and he hopes to sign up three more this year.
"We have beautiful rules," he said, "but implementation is the key."
LISBON From his office in a glass and steel building perched above the Tagus estuary, Willem de Ruiter gazes out across the water, waiting for a disaster to happen.
De Ruiter, executive director of the European Maritime Safety Agency, directs efforts to prevent, or at least contain, major oil spills from tankers off the coasts of Europe.
The agency was set up after a long series of tanker accidents, culminating in the sinking of the Erika in December 1999, which spilled an estimated 20,000 tons of heavy fuel oil onto the beaches of Brittany, and the breakup of the Prestige in November 2002, which spread an estimated 63,000 tons in a slick from northern Portugal across the Bay of Biscay, and up the Spanish and French coasts to the Île d'Yeu.
According to WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, the Prestige spill killed 300,000 seabirds and hundreds of dolphins, porpoises, seals and turtles.
About 100,000 families were directly affected by the disaster and, by May this year, compensation claims received by an international fund established to deal with oil spill disasters totaled 867 million, or $1.1 billion. An estimate by Spanish economists quoted by WWF in 2003 put the possible long- term cost as high as 5 billion.
There has been no major accident since the Prestige disaster - an improvement that de Ruiter attributes to improved safety measures, including tougher and more frequent on-board ship inspections under the European Union's port control system. Improved standards resulting from the tighter inspection regime cut the number of ships detained by the EU port authorities for safety violations to an all-time low of 994 last year, from 1,699 in 2001, according to maritime safety officials.
Still, de Ruiter has no illusions. "It can and will happen again," he said in an interview. "Accidents happen."
Adding to the risk is the dramatic increase in oil exports from Russia and other former Soviet states to Europe. Exports rose 35 percent to 244 million tons in 2003 from 181 million tons in 2002, according to the safety agency's latest figures, with increasing volumes passing through pipelines to tanker terminals on the Baltic, the Sea of Murmansk and the Black Sea.
Tanker traffic through the Baltic is likely to rise about 30 percent to 14,472 ships in 2015 from 11,256 in 2002, while coast guard projections in Norway for the northwest Arctic tanker route to Europe and the United States see traffic rising to three 100,000-ton tankers a day by 2015 from one 30,000- ton tanker a day last year.
"Is the risk increasing?" de Ruiter asked. "The answer is yes. Ships are getting bigger and the products are not getting any cleaner."
"Russia is using all its outlets. So you have large tankers everywhere around the EU coast."
The growing use of the Arctic as a shipping route brings new dangers, because many ships are not adequately equipped to cope with ice. "We're very worried about shipping lanes opening up in those areas. It's very, very difficult to handle a spill under ice," said Simon Walmsley, head of the marine program of WWF-UK, the British branch of WWF.
Meanwhile, the Baltic and Black Sea/Mediterranean routes involve passage by tankers daily in both directions through narrow straits, like the Bosporus and the narrow seas around Denmark, where ships often go aground, and through seas that have particularly fragile ecosystems.
"The Baltic is almost totally enclosed by land," the European safety agency noted in an oil pollution response plan prepared in 2004. "As the world's largest brackish sea, it is ecologically unique, given that brackish bay water and surface water force the marine and fresh-water species to live on the edge of their survival limits."
Another problem is a growing number of ship-to-ship oil transfers, which Walmsley said can cause more pollution and are as serious a threat to the environment as collisions. Many Russian tankers moving through the Arctic transfer oil to shuttle tankers aro
-Pays de la Loire