French Beach Oil Slick Toll Rises

A new wave of heavy fuel oil from the sunken tanker Erika washed onto France's storm-battered western coast last week, this time hitting the shores of Ile de Re, a jagged point below the northwestern peninsula of Brittany, whose wealth of sandy beaches and rocky inlets are a haven for seabirds - and tourists in summertime. The weekend's millennium festivities provided a distraction, but little respite for islanders and mainland residents as well as the fishermen, birds and mammals hit by the progressive oil invasion. More than 13,000 birds have so far been contaminated by the slick which hit the coast on Christmas Eve, almost two weeks after the Maltese-registered Erika broke up in storms with 25,000 tons of oil aboard on Dec. 12. The French League for the Protection of Birds last week reported the first seal snared by oil on a beach near Lorient, one of the northernmost coastal zones hit by a chain-like slick that is slowly expanding southwards. In the Loire-Atlantique region, Army teams worked over the weekend to protect the tiny port of La Turballe, where fishing boats were locked in during efforts to contain an oil onslaught. The same region was also devastated by storms which wreaked havoc during the holidays, flooding homes, toppling thousands of trees and cutting phone and power lines to millions of homes across the country. A robot sent down to explore one part of the sunken vessel got stuck 394 ft. (120 m) below the surface, according to a coastguard spokesman in the town of Brest. He did not know whether the robot, whose findings could help future efforts to pump unleaked oil out of the wreck, had been snared or broken down, and dismissed the idea that the problem could be related to millennium-bug computer malfunction. French oil company TotalFina, whose boss Thierry Desmarest has been combating a wave of negative publicity for chartering the Erika, has argued it is not liable, but late last week offered $6.1 million to help with the clean-up efforts. The money is supposed to go toward pumping the 15,000 tons of oil still believed to be inside the two sections of the vessel that have been lying on the seafloor since mid-December.