From the coast road, the beaches of Lira seem as they should be: yellow sand and blue sea. But walk down to the tide's edge and things change. A whiff of petrol taints the sea spray. Water in rock pools has an oily sheen and boulders that should be wet and slippery have a tacky, tarry coating. After the oil-tanker Prestige spilt her cargo last November, these coves in Galicia, in northwest Spain, were a metre deep in a mixture of oil and sea water known to pollution specialists as 'chocolate mousse'. "There was no ocean, only oil," says Pablo Garcia, manager of the Stolt Sea Farm, an aquaculture company in Lira, the area that became known as Ground Zero of the spill. The Prestige is the latest exhibit in the tanker hall of infamy. But while each new incident brings environmental destruction and financial loss, it also improves our understanding of how to deal with oil spills. This knowledge is hard-won ― aggressive clean-ups have sometimes caused more damage than the oil. Government priorities can also clash with those of scientists. But such difficulties apart, a rough consensus on how to juggle the political, economic and ecological issues involved in clearing up oil spills has begun to emerge. Oil is much less damaging at sea than on shore, so the best option is to suck and skim a slick off the water using specially equipped ships, or break it up with chemical disper-sants. Booms can also be used to protect the coastline. But the sea around the Prestige was too rough and much of the coast too exposed for booms to work, so there was little that could be done except watch the oil wash up.
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