Spanish Rainbow Ends in Tanker’s Spilled Pots of Oil : Pollution: The local refinery is a big source of employment and a focus of civic pride. But Galicia’s waters form Europe’s principal fishing region.

Have you ever seen a cruel rainbow?

Fireman Jose Faino saw one Saturday morning. He turned away from it with a shrug that became a sigh.

“That’s what you call irony, isn’t it?” Faino asked.

Or a cosmic joke.

Through a sharp shower that exploded suddenly from a blue sky, the rainbow arched across a green headland framed by full-bodied Atlantic combers ending a long journey.

The waves pounding the western edge of Europe here arrive with strength, beauty and threat. They have fascinated people, and worried them, for millennia.

The rainbow backlighted an 18th-Century monstrosity that contains a Roman tower--the Tower of Hercules--that may have been Europe’s first lighthouse. Then it lanced into the sea, pointing the way, not, alas, to any pot of gold. Pointing, rather, to the shattered carcass of a tanker, to two broken pots of oil.

An occasional tongue of listless flame licked at the blackened stern section of the tanker Aegean Sea, hard aground under Hercule’s tower. The sunken bow section, precariously housing nobody knows how many thousands of tons of oil, lay under the breakers. Only the foremast tip was visible to Faino as he walked back to his big, red, impotent fire truck.

“It’s hard to know what to tell the kids, isn’t it?” Faino mused. “Nobody likes pollution, but you wouldn’t shut down an airport, would you, just because one plane crashed?”

The oil spill from the Aegean Sea is the third in 16 years to soil the sea off the coast of Galicia, Europe’s principal fishing region. Fishing is the largest employer and generates nearly $1 million a day here in Spain’s least developed region. A small but growing tourist industry also relies on the sea.

But for La Coruna, a city of about 250,000, the local oil refinery is also an important source of employment and income. More, it is a focus of civic pride, a symbol of an economic coming of age: of catching up.

The refinery is small as refineries are measured, but it is busy. The Aegean Sea, which ran aground and broke up Thursday after it strayed from the channel to the refinery in a fierce storm, was one of an average of 40 tankers that call at La Coruna each month. Five big tankers, like the Aegean Sea, bring crude oil, and 35 smaller ones carry away refined petroleum products.

Not surprisingly, the new spill, whose environmental impact will not be fully apparent for long weeks to come, has sharpened a longstanding local conflict between developers and conservers, leaving everyday Galicians like fireman Faino in the perplexed middle.

Public assessments here Saturday of the Aegean Sea impact became exercises in rival self-interest.

On one hand were smiling Spanish officials, local mayor to national minister. On the other were frowning local environmental groups, reinforced by imported big green guns.

On a rare point of agreement, both sides said that a first priority must be to get the remaining oil off the sunken bow section of the Aegean Sea.

“The oil in the forward part of the ship is a disaster waiting to happen,” said Alberto Kuiken, captain of the Greenpeace vessel Solo. Kuiken and other Greenpeace activists from outside Spain addressed a press conference together with local ecology groups.

Said Joaquin Ros, deputy director of the central government’s environment agency in Madrid: “Whether this turns out to be a big disaster or a small one all depends on those 40,000-50,000 tons of petroleum still on the ship.”

The Aegean Sea, whose captain was released on bail by a Spanish judge Saturday, carried about 80,000 tons of British light crude. That is twice as much as was lost from the Exxon Valdez, Greenpeace oil expert Jeremy Liggett told reporters Saturday.

Some of the Aegean Sea’s cargo leaked into the sea, a lot of it burned in a spectacular 24-hour fire, and the rest is in sunken bow tanks now being pummeled by the waves.

Officials say no attempt to begin the laborious draining of the tanks can commence until after the weather moderates and divers have surveyed the wreck.

About 60 miles of the spare, beautiful Galician coastline was already stained with oil Saturday, and, by all accounts, there is more to come. At sea, spots of oil were apparent in an area of about 50 square miles, according to Gov. Pilar Lledo.

“I am not a technician, but my impression is that the sea is much better than it was yesterday,” she told a news conference after flying over the affected area.

Many in Galicia remember a huge 1976 spill of heavy crude. This time, officials reassure at every turn: There is less oil and it is of a less pernicious sort of petroleum.

“Things are better. There are problems, but they are not as big as we first thought. There is probably more oil still aboard the tanker than we believed,” said national Merchant Marine Minister Rafael Lobeto.

Marine life will be protected and beaches will be clean in time for tourists next summer, Lobeto promised.

Said Greenpeace’s Kuiken, “It’ll be years before you’ll have good mussels again in this area.”

Lobeto said that 16 oil barriers and 15 skimmers deployed by a small armada of tugs and rescue boats were holding their own in efforts to protect beaches and rich shellfish nurseries in estuaries along the coast.

A procession of Greenpeace executives joined local ecologists to dismiss the government effort as insufficient and cosmetic.

The impact on marine life and sea birds in the affected area will not be clear for months, but Raul Garcia, spokesman for a La Coruna ecology group, said volunteers had already counted 2,000 birds with damage from oil.

The port of La Coruna was reopened to commercial traffic Saturday, but fishing has been banned in the worst-affected areas for two weeks, and the government is paying stipends to around 800 forcibly idled fishermen.

La Coruna’s cruel rainbow vanished as quickly as the squall that brought it Saturday to a coast where the very air tastes of burned oil. A more enduring image in a city encouraged by this new mishap to re-examine its priorities was that of a laden coastal tanker sliding silently out to sea past the wreck of the Aegean Sea.