High penalties required: a ship dumps tons of oil off Corsica. Such environmental crimes often go unnoticed
It is not a full-blown environmental disaster, but the ecological and economic damage to the French Mediterranean island of Corsica is considerable. The Kors: Inside are upset before the bathing season – and angry because nobody knows who is behind the undoubtedly deliberate pollution.
Last Friday, planes saw two oil spills southeast of Corsica for the first time. Most of it drifts out to sea with the current. But fist-sized pieces of granulate are washed ashore on several beaches in Porto-Vecchio, Solaro and Conca. They are distributed over a total length of 500 meters. The beaches had to be closed. Special forces have already collected several tons of the hardened silt. As time progresses, however, smaller and smaller pieces arrive that are difficult to remove.
In the opinion of all experts, there is an unknown captain at the origin who has emptied a ship’s tank. It’s illegal. The public prosecutor’s office in the southern French port city of Marseille is investigating. In a first phase, she tries to understand the ship’s movements over the past week. “The containment is underway,” said the authorities. “It has already allowed a certain number of suspicious ships to be identified.”
Number of the day
According to WWF estimates, ships empty 1.5 million tons of oil annually in the Mediterranean alone
When gases are released that could explode in the ship’s hull, around a fifth of liquid oil is also released. Captains and shipping companies often do this at night and on the open sea in order to avoid the costs of tank cleaning. One reason why these environmental crimes are rarely justified or the culprits are even caught is the lack of cooperation between the neighboring countries concerned.
It is naturally difficult to say how widespread such tank emptying is. Years ago the environmental organization WWF estimated the volume at 1.5 million tons of oil per year in a report – mind you, only in the comparatively small Mediterranean Sea. This amount corresponds to almost a hundred serious oil disasters caused by notorious tankers such as “Prestige” (2002 in Northern Spain) or “Erika” (1999 in Brittany).
France punishes this illegal practice with fines, the maximum amount of which can be several million. A year ago a court in Brest, Brittany, imposed a fine of 800,000 euros on a Russian ship for so-called “dégazage” – unauthorized drainage.
The head of the Corsican Executive Council, Gilles Simeoni, demands that “the perpetrators and those responsible for them be severely punished”. The image damage is great for Corsica. The “island of beauty” had suffered badly from the pandemic for more than a year. The reservations made by travelers for the summer months were in full swing. Well-known beaches like Santa Giulia are now making negative headlines. It is not yet known whether there will be cancellations at the popular seaside resort and leisure port of Porto-Vecchio. What is certain is that the alluvial oil is limited to a very limited area of the long Corsican coast. Some beaches on the east coast opened again on Wednesday.
