The Black Tide

France fights an oily enemy

For 45 minutes, hovering and circling over the sea, French navy helicopters dropped load after load of depth charges. They were striking back at a very real enemy, the wreck of the American-owned supertanker Amoco Cadiz, which had leaked oil for two weeks after history's biggest spill.

High winds and heavy seas had prevented French authorities from pumping out the supertanker's remaining 15,000 tons of oil (of an original 220,000 tons). Efforts to release the trapped crude with explosives planted by divers under the ship's surviving tanks had failed. So, amid a rising national clamor for action, officials ordered in the choppers. That way, at least, all the oil would finally be released and there would be no prospect of months and perhaps even years of continued oil trickles along northern Brittany's already badly tarred beaches, as the Amoco Cadiz slowly broke up.

Ashore, all France seemed to be mobilizing to fight back la Maree Noire (the Black Tide). Trains to Brittany were jammed with volunteers, mostly young people expecting to spend their Easter holidays literally scrubbing rocks and gathering up blackened birds. Handprinted signs in every coastal village from Portsall to Roscoff announced mobilization meetings. Newspapers all over the country were flooded with offers of money and goods for Brittany's hard-hit fishermen; a radio station collected everything from pitchforks to rubber boots. A folk music group offered the earnings from a special new recording about the spill for the cleanup. Thousands of young people seized the catastrophe for political protest, shouting antinuclear-power slogans during a march in the port city of Brest (example: "Oil-covered today, radioactive tomorrow!").

As work gangs attempted to scoop up the sticky scum on beaches and in inlets, dismayed marine biologists and fishermen were already giving a fairly bleak assessment of the long-term damage. Because the Amoco Cadiz's oil is lighter and was released closer to the French shore than that from the Torrey Canyon, which blackened the English coast a decade ago, it had spread faster and penetrated deeper into Brittany's many inlets and estuaries. Even farther out to sea many food fish, except possibly sole, which stay near the bottom, will be contaminated. The season's take of crabs, including green crabs used for bouillabaisse, may be wiped out. In addition, ornithologists noted, an archipelago called the Seven Islands, France's largest marine bird sanctuary, is surrounded by oil.

Most serious of all, the slick could do irreparable damage to plankton and other algae. At the bottom of the ocean food chain, these simple organisms, directly or indirectly, provide sustenance --to say nothing of life-giving oxygen --for all the creatures higher up on the ladder of marine life. The Breton seaweed crop, grown for the pharmaceutical, textile and food industries, represents 90% of France's seaweed production and 75% of Europe's. This year's crop has been heavily damaged.

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