SQUEEZING THE LAST DROPS
Friday 6 December 2002. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I was standing with three friends at the top of a cliff near Mundaka, one of the world’s most iconic surf spots. We watched in horror as a gigantic black stain advanced towards the coast. Minutes later, the waves started dumping millions of blobs of crude oil onto the shoreline. In the space of a few hours, the beautiful butter-yellow sand had turned into a stinking carpet of black, sticky tar.
There would be no surfing for the rest of the winter, and no fishing for nine months anywhere in the Bay of Biscay. Hundreds of thousands of birds and other creatures would die, and the ecosystem would be forever altered.
The oil had come from a supertanker called the MV Prestige, which had broken up in heavy seas off Galicia about two weeks before. The oil had spread all the way along the north coast of Spain and
