Prestige: South-western defence area
The response operation in this part of the country pressed ahead from January to March but was followed by a subsequent period from April to December when operations were much less active. During the January-to-March period the job involved removing the bulk of the oil of which there was a great deal and thereafter fine tuning the clean-up and repeatedly removing subsequent arrivals of oil, of which there was much less.
There happens to be a very close correlation between the number of man-days and the quantities collected as the constant effort provided by the responders amounted to an average daily throughput of about 260 kilos per responder. Going solely by the number of days that oil managed to reach the coastlines, the Landes, Gironde and western Pyrenees were the hardest hit with 10,000, 6,000 and 2,000 tonnes respectively of polluted waste as compared with only a few hundred tonnes in Charente-maritime.
It will be appreciated
that the daily average for collected materials in the Landes was
far higher than the area average and was about 400 kilos per responder
due to long stretches of even beach whereas in Gironde and the western
Pyrenees the situation was the contrary. In the latter area the
rock cleaning operation was difficult, man intensive and a major
undertaking that lasted far longer than the summer of 2003 but did
not involve proportionately more collected materials for all that.
Tonnages and kinds of waste collected in the South West Defence
Area in 2003 (click to enlarge)
Personnel employed and waste collected in the South West Defence Area in 2003 (click to enlarge)
Elimination processes storage centres for intermediate and heavy oils in the South Western Defence Area, in Jan. 2004. Source: Drire Aquitaine. (click to enlarge)
Last update: April 2004