Throngs Protest Handling of Spill

Tens of thousands of demonstrators packed the capital of Spain’s Galicia region Sunday to protest the government’s handling of a tanker disaster as a new wave of fuel oil hit Spanish beaches.

The streets of Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain were thronged with marchers upset by the destruction wrought on the region’s environment and fisheries by a huge oil spill from the sunken tanker Prestige.

Organizers of the march, held under the slogan “Never Again,” estimated that as many as 200,000 people tromped through driving rain under a sea of umbrellas. There was no official estimate, but one local police officer agreed with that figure.

Marcher Juan Raimundez, his clothes smeared with oil from the cleanup, accused authorities of playing down the disaster. “You can’t lie and take the situation so lightly.... Those of us who’ve been to clean up have no doubt it’s a catastrophe.”

Demonstrators, criticizing the authorities’ response to the spill as slow and inadequate, called for the Spanish and Galician regional governments to resign.

Seventy miles away, on Galicia’s “Coast of Death,” patches of oil from the 26-year-old tanker, which broke up and sank Nov. 19 in deep Atlantic waters, continued to wash up.

Meanwhile, a large slick containing thousands of tons of oil was about 19 miles offshore, Environment Minister Jaume Matas said. But driving rain and shifting winds and currents made it difficult to predict where the slick would end up.