Seldom does the European Union miss an opportunity to pursue its protectionist agenda. No sooner had the first slugs of crude oil from the sunken Estonian oil tanker, the Prestige, arrived on the Spanish coast than France, Spain, Portugal and Italy moved to banish single-hulled oil-tankers of more than 15 years’ vintage from European waters: which means within 200 miles of European coasts.
An oil slick, of course, is an ecological disaster, but would a double hull really have prevented the sinking of the Prestige? ‘A double-hulled ship has more built-in redundancy,’ says Robert Saunders, technical information officer for the Royal Institution of Naval Architects. ‘It is possible that a crack in an outer hull won’t spread to an inner hull. But what really matters is how much time has passed since the ship’s last survey. And the trouble with double-hulled ships is that they are more difficult to survey, because you have to send someone down into the tiny compartments between the hulls.’
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