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Support provided by SYCOPOL: adapting the lessons learned from the Erika spill

Sycopol was approached by some of its member companies that had been contacted by the national authorities for assistance in combating the oil pollution and cleaning up the coastline polluted by the Prestige. After responding several times in November 2002 on Galician coastlines, response operations on the French coastline started at the start of January 2003. From that point on, all Sycopol companies involved in the response effort up until December 2003 had to learn to adapt:

• to the environment, first of all. They also had to get used to the different kinds of sand encountered in the field, dry or wet (tides) fine grain or coarse grained, ambient temperatures, 10°C in January and 30°C in July, the pollutant that was either hard or soft which also complicated matters in terms of access which was hard to find and not easy to navigate so as to shuttle men and equipment and evacuate the recovered materials afterwards
• to the various difficulties encountered from the tourist and political points of view, requiring priorities that did not necessarily have any relationship with pollution response requirements and therefore involved mobilising and demobilising people and equipment which wasted time for many
• to the particularities of the oil spilled by the Prestige which beached all the time over a space of a number of months and that polluted a very long stretch of coastline which meant big variations in terms of manpower and equipment requirements throughout the entire response operation. Sycopol member companies had to adapt to the response organisation and the equipment provided by the authorities during the first few weeks of the effort and thereafter had to adapt to the zone co-ordination measures put in place by regional and local authorities.

Beach clean-up (Source: Cedre)

Thanks to the constant effort made to adapt to an ever changing environment and using a number of techniques or equipment for the very first time on an operational scale, Sycopol company members were able to make a difference to the entire response operation all along the coastline and make a contribution to mitigating the effects of the spill on the amenities during the summer season despite the massive arrivals of FO in July 2003.


Recruitment of private response teams (men/days) in both Defence Areas in 2003.


Last update: April 2004