Friday, March 29

Greenpeace honors volunteers on the 20th anniversary of the sinking of the ‘Prestige’


After six days being towed off the Galician coast after sending an SOS in the middle of the storm, the prestige it broke in two and sank on November 19, 2002. From its interior, loaded with 77,000 tons of fuel, a large part of the tar that it carried came out and the oil slick irreparably devastated the Galician coast and also reached Portugal and France . Before, the black stain that the oil tanker was leaving behind had already reached the Costa da Morte, considered ground zero for the catastrophe. This Saturday, just 20 years after the oil tanker went down, the environmental organization Greenpeace has paid tribute in Muxía to the volunteers who then came to remove tar from beaches and rocks.

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Greenpeace recalls that the catastrophe reached almost 3,000 kilometers of coastline in Europe and that the thousands of volunteers from all over the world were the citizen’s response to administrations bent on manipulating the obvious. Muxía, the organization points out, is one of the most symbolic places. Its representatives have displayed the banners next to the sanctuary of A Virxe da Barca and have highlighted the importance of “preserving the memory of what happened.”

A Greenpeace volunteer, Begoña Vila, stresses that the catastrophe was “dramatic”, but that it would have been “more devastating without the heroic reaction of civil society”, while the authorities “failed miserably”. “It’s only fair that we don’t forget that,” she says.

The NGO states that the conditions for a Prestige to be repeated “are still present”. In front of Muxía, more than 36,000 ships pass each year and more than a third of them carry dangerous goods. “The fossil fuel industry continues to pass off our coasts and act with total impunity and opacity,” denounces Nerea Davila, another Greenpeace volunteer, who considers it necessary for society to get rid of “as soon as possible” what she describes as “addiction to fossil fuels.



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