Prestige: Western defence area
Initially,
the very first arrivals of oil between April and July occurred
much later on than in the South-western area and was followed
by an intense fine tuning clean-up operation from August
to December. In this case there was also a close correlation
between the recovery effort put in and the quantities collected
per responder per day and amounted to 250 kilos which was
almost as much as in the south-western area. But when the
situation is regarded from the throughput point of view
it becomes clear that the collected quantities were six
times less for a longer stretch of coastline which shows
that there was much less pollution to collect.
Oil
arriving on Donnant beach at Belle-Ile-en-Mer (56) in May
2003.
(Source: Cedre)
As
expected on account of the number of days oil was found
on the beaches it was in Finistere and Côte-d’Armor
that the oiling was really very high in this defence area
with 1800 and 600 tonnes of oily waste respectively compared
with 300 tonnes in each of the five other « départements
» that were also oiled. The oily waste recovery rate
in these « départements » (more than
400 kg per man par day in Finistere and more than 300 kg
per man per day in the Côte-d’Armor) turned
the average zone recovery rate into a much higher figure.
Oiling
of a stretch of pebble beach, Crumuni. (Plovan) Penhors (29)
Oct. 2003.
(Source: Cedre)
From
May to August when there were repeated arrivals/beachings of oil
in this defence area, Finistere was seriously polluted from May
to July. The pollution involved sporadic beachings of tarballs and
cakes on stretches of coastline ranging from a few hundred yards
to several miles with varying frequency and intensity. The geographical
area polluted by the Prestige was such that Departmental Polmar
plans could have been triggered in addition to zone co-ordination,
but the pollution pattern was so variable and random that it was
decided to let local teams and authorities deal with the day to
day basics.
Organising the response
The
Departmental and the Regional Prefects implemented an intermediary
solution which was to avoid triggering the Polmar plan ashore and
letting local authorities take responsibility for the clean-up but
the Prefects would agree to supplies the manpower, machines and
materials need for the clean-up in addition to the lorries used
for evacuating collected materials and waste treatment facilities.
This strategy enabled local authorities to decide on what their
individual priorities were, avail themselves of technical advice
from Cedre for site assessment, replace municipal personnel by Civil
Defence personnel and service companies specialising in pollution
clean-up that had negotiated a contract for the job and to recruit
clean-up staff based on a contract with the Prefectures via the
Community of Communes.
Tonnages and kinds of waste collected in the Western Defence
Area in 2003 (click to enlarge)
Personnel employed and waste collected in the Western Defence
Area in 2003 (click to enlarge)
Prestige
oil covering former spill at La Louve in
Esquibien (29), Oct.
2003.
(Source: Cedre)
Response and clean-up operations
With this procedure, response was swift and well suited to local requirements that were defined jointly so as to ensure that the amenities would be ready for the tourist season. This involved:
- immediate removal of oil on amenity or sensitive beaches
- final clean-up of sandy or pebble beaches
- removal of the bulk of the oil by scraping rocks and cobblestones with trowels
- fine tuning rocky areas or cobblestone beaches located very close to seaside resorts
- cleaning pebbles and cobblestones of remoter areas to avoid burying in the substrate particularly when the weather is too hot or providing the beaches can be reached easily for the purposes of manual collection.
Manual
collection and response by response teams, Tronoen beach (29),
in May 2003.
(Source: Cedre)
When rocky areas ere hard to reach, the option was to let wave action do the job. With the exception of small townships with very long beaches, sandy beaches were generally reinstated very quickly. The residual problem being that tarballs and micro tarballs were coated with sand that beach cleaners were at a loss to deal with.
Hard substrates were cleaned by scraping (rocks, boulders, pebbles) with trowels, the main objective being to avoid remobilisation and repolluting cleaned beaches.
Treatment of recovered polluted materials
In
view of the repeated beachings of oil and the quantities involved
and recovered in Aquitaine, the storage, transport and final elimination
of recovered waste had to be processed using the just in time procedure.
Recovered waste was stored in skips and transported directly to
the treatment centres. More often than not, solid waste was disposed
of by incineration and depending on whether waste was sandy or non
sandy waste, the recovered materials (waste) was treated in one
or another of the dedicated treatment centres. By the month of January
2004, the storage facilities were either empty or clean and all
recovered materials had been treated. All in all, 15,627 tonnes
of pollutant and polluted materials of all kinds were treated in
the western Defence area.
Treatment of polluted seaweed
At
the start of the summer season, responders had to contend with polluted
seaweed washed up on the coastline of Finistere. The main concern
was where to store and dry them before final disposal. The heaps
of seaweed were uneven quantity wise as some townships only produced
a few cubic metres of seaweed whereas others managed to dispose
of hundred of cubic metres. The biggest pile of seaweed involved
750 cubic metres of seaweed coated with sand that a company had
offered to treat but the cost was too high. Most of the seaweed
was treated in situ on the storage site at the beginning of the
summer months, namely the sand and seaweed were separated by sieving,
laid out and covered with quicklime after which the dried seaweed
was sent to the incineration plant. Sand was put back on the beach
after being analysed to bolster the rocky stretches of the coastline.
Heap
of seaweed containing 60% seaweed, 30% sand and 10% HFO, at
Guisseny (29) in Nov. 2003.
(Source: Cedre)
Two
solutions were reached for the remaining seaweed (heaps from 20
to 250 cu m). Lightly oiled seaweed was stored ashore during the
summer and put back in the water when the tide was going back out,
which enabled sorting and drying of the seaweed and the tarballs
on the foreshore before actually collecting the materials by hand.
Heavily oiled seaweed was sent for incineration after being coated
with quicklime in a bid to reduce treatment volumes.
Significant oiling of stone blocks and pebbles,
Plage des Dames, Landunvez (29) Oct. 2003
(Source: Cedre)
Last update: April 2004