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journalist framed them aptly: “Whom,” he asks, “does a Galician
fi sherman call about compensation for his threatened livelihood?
And how much longer must a world revolted by spills put up with
these daisy chains of responsibility?”^60
The Prestige incident is especially tragic in the light of a set of
regulations that were already in place to eliminate substandard ves-
sels. These regulations require new petroleum tankers to have dou-
ble hulls and require shipping companies to retire or retrofi t their
oldest and largest single-hulled vessels fi rst. With a double hull, a
collision only fl oods the ship’s bottom compartment. Double hulls
can signifi cantly reduce the amount of spillage in grounding acci-
dents; estimates say that the Exxon Valdez spill would have been 60
percent smaller if the ship had had a double hull. Double hulls have
been required in passenger vessels for several decades. The United
States introduced the mandate for oil tankers calling at U.S. ports
as part of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, and all tankers in U.S. wa-
ters must have double hulls by 2015.^61 The International Maritime
Organization and the European Commission had introduced dou-
ble-hull legislation for vessels in European waters in 1992. When
the single-hulled tanker Erika sank and oiled the coast of Brittany
in 1999, the two organizations sped up the phase-out deadlines for
such vessels. The twenty-six-year-old, single-hulled Prestige would
have been banned in European waters by 2005.
Although all experts agree that double hulls can signifi cantly
reduce the damage from tanker spills, oil companies have pre-
sented obstacles and found loopholes in the regulations. For exam-
ple, Congress had attempted to introduce double-hull requirements
and other measures to reduce oil pollution fi fteen years before
the Exxon Valdez spill. Opponents in the oil and shipping indus-
try argued that the double-hull mandates “disrupt oil transporta-
tion and potentially affect the national economy.”^62 To be sure, the
expense of replacing a single-hulled ship is signifi cant. A new, dou-
ble-hulled tanker built in the United States can cost $300 million.
To save money, some tanker owners do not replace their retiring
single-hulled tankers with double-hulled ships. Instead, they sim-
ply replace them with younger single-hulled vessels.^63 Purportedly,