Prestige, an oil tanker laden with heavy fuel, broke in two and plunged three thousand five hundred meters to the bottom of the sea off Spain in November 2002. The ship spilt some five thousand tonnes of oil, with over 65,000 tonnes of oil still trapped in the sunken wreckage. Environmentalists fear that this is one of the world’s worst oil spill accidents since Exxon Valdez in Alaska in 1989.

Meanwhile, Spain approached France to send a mini submarine to the ocean floor to check if the tanker was still leaking oil. Spanish and Portuguese navies have already begun patrolling their territorial waters to prevent single-hulled and ageing oil tankers from entering their waters. On its part, the European Union has published a list of sixty-six ships that it considers do not comply with maritime safety rules and wants them banned from EU ports. EU Transportation Commissioner Loyola de Palacio has noted that if maritime safety rules drawn up in 1999 after a similar oil spill off the coast of France are not applied vigorously, there will be more such catastrophes.

The Prestige incident has raised three important issues. First, the ship was an aging single-hull model, built in the 1970s in Japan with cheap steel. Importantly, the ship’s hull had already cracked once; and, repairs put it back into navigation. In recent years, advancements in technology have greatly improved the quality of the ships. The shipbuilding industry has made progress in terms of ship design, propulsion, navigation and habitability. However, the number of ship accidents at sea has increased. Among other reasons for the accidents, ship husbandry and age of ship has been a matter of concern. Between 1992 and 1999, a total of 593 ships were lost at sea; among which 77 were oil tankers and 60 of these tankers lost were more than twenty years old. International agreements require all tankers built since 1996 to have a double hull. But the powerful shipping and oil industries have managed to keep most of the older single-hull tankers out of the pact, allowing them to ply the seas until 2015. Many of these vessels are disasters waiting to happen.

Second, the Prestige had been chartered by an oil brokerage in London, headquartered in Geneva, but owned by one of the infamous Russian “oligarchsâ€Â