Prestige: Involvement of Cedre
As soon as the accident was announced, on November the 13th, Cedre activated its response centre. It was mobilized by the Prefet maritime of the Atlantic to assess the risks to prepare location and drift forecast charts. Within days, the national drift committee ( French Navy, Météo France, IFREMER, SHOM and Cedre) was operational in our facilities. The director attended the daily meetings of the French command centre of the maritime prefecture and daily situation reports were dispatched to the authorities.
On
request of our Spanish partners from SASEMAR, experts were sent
to Galicia on November the 16th. A continuous attendance was ensured
in Spain until the end of December. In this period, the striking
element was without a doubt the unexpected importance the Spanish
public and media gave to our website. They are desperately short
of technical information on the ways to face a major pollution of
that kind, as the national and regional authorities in charge had
no website of their own readily operational. Thanks to the efforts
made by a Spanish trainee working at Cedre’s and with the
help of Galician and other Spanish academics, our site was translated
every day in Spanish. Visits to our site passed from 2,500 to 55,000
in a month almost half of them from Spain. These among us speaking
Spanish were submerged by interview requests from the Spanish media.
Bonds were tightened with our usual partners and new ones were built
with AZTI and the Galician authorities.
Last update: June
2003
