Xurxo Souto, singer of Os Diplomáticos de Monte Alto and one of the leaders of the Ahora Máis movement (and its cultural arm Burla Negra), bought his first mobile phone in the days of Chapapote, when it began with the decline of the Prestige Galicia the color of the Grief faded and covered in dead birds between late 2002 and early 2003. Until that moment, the musician had not felt the need to be connected to everyone when he left home. But the landline was not enough given the scale of the worst environmental disaster Spain had ever experienced and the need to be present everywhere. “We communicated by SMS, but of course person to person and without videos or images, as is now possible via WhatsApp,” recalls another prominent witness to these events, Xosé Manuel Pereiro, author of “Prestige”. As I Was, As We Were (Prestige. As It Was, As We Were, Editorial Galaxia) and Coordinator of Chapapote (Libros del KO). “We had to pass on information to large groups via email lists,” explains the journalist, “so demonstrations and rallies were called, like those that took place in front of the government delegations on March 11th.”
The transmission of indignation in the face of ecological and social alarms was slower and did not reach all target groups with the astonishing agility of current networks, which have been accumulating photos and videos of influencers and witnesses walking on the beach since Friday. On TikTok, on Facebook, on Instagram there are more or less happy comments from experts and non-experts and calls for solidarity. Smartphones reached the sandbanks contaminated with plastic pellets long before the political leaders who continued to argue this Monday over the powers to manage the cleaning of these pellets of less than five millimeters, which come from a container ship whose formula is still a mystery.
This power of networks and the WhatsApp and Telegram macro groups that have emerged with hundreds of participants are the origin of the volunteer work that has been organized since the weekend to clean up the Galician coast. Ball by ball, with your hands, with sieves, sieves, baskets, dustpans and brooms. In Galicia, the strength and immediacy of the networks was demonstrated for the first time in the major fires that devastated the municipality in October 2017, when the fire ravaged 62,000 hectares in about three days, killing four people. The internet was instantly flooded with frightening videos of flames on the edge of homes and neighbors creating human chains to carry water to the eruptions that were spreading uncontrollably.
“Many marine animals die because they mistake plastic pellets for food,” says a young man from the Muros y Noia estuary in a recent TikTok video. “These little threads, these little balls,” criticizes another girl, alluding to the “strings of clay” with which Mariano Rajoy defined the thick, black fuel that flooded the Galician coast 21 years ago. “These people must have thought… 'We're at Christmas parties, why are we troubling everyone with something that's simply a prestige White Tide version?'” this Tiktoker continues wryly, referring to the Xunta government. The volunteer places help to do what the Xunta de Galicia does not do.” “This is the drama that we are experiencing these days on the Galician coast,” continues the young man, also on TikTok, while in the background Grândola , vila morena plays. Another group of volunteers spreads on social networks a scene that they have just seen: they say that the cleaning team mobilized by the Galician executive went to work on the beach, at the same time as the arrival of a team of reporters from Galician television and that when The camera has disappeared, the operators have disappeared. The message spreads like wildfire.
“Although communication was done by email and SMS,” recalls Pereiro, “the prestige crisis was the first crisis we experienced with the Internet: there was already the possibility of finding a lot of information, we could use the websites of the various oceanographic institutes.” Europe, such as the French CEDRE [Centro de Documentación, Investigación y Experimentación sobre la Contaminación Accidental del Agua]“. In addition, “at that time and as a result of the catastrophe, blogs multiplied,” he points out. “Bloggers were the influencers of the time, but with one fundamental quality: they had to be able to write,” jokes Pereiro.
The experienced reporter is an expert in covering the Galician coast for many media outlets, including RTVE and EL PAÍS, and recalls other episodes in which, like this pellet crisis, container ships lost their cargo off the Galician coast. In 2006, a cargo ship littered the beaches of the Carballo area (A Coruña) with various objects. Curiously, “different goods arrived at each beach, so one was filled with printers, another only received computer cases, and another received soup cans.”
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Tires and tomato paste
In 2018, the MSC Eloane lost almost 40 containers off the Costa da Morte. The sandy beaches were covered with milk powder cans, leather sofas and boxes of American blonde tobacco. These shipwreck goods are called crebas in Galicia and have been pushed to the coast by the force of the ocean and wind for centuries and collected by the population. The current flood of pellets, plastic pellets or noodles, a marine pollution that has plagued many of the world's coasts for decades, is traced back to a container that fell into the sea from the deck of the Liberian-flagged merchant ship Toconao. With this deposit, as announced yesterday by the government delegation in Galicia, another five were provided with “tomato paste, tires, aluminum rods and rolls of foil”.
The accident occurred further south, off the coast of Viana do Castelo in Portugal, but the cargo was pushed by the sea towards Galicia and reached Asturias on Sunday. According to information provided to the central government by the Maersk shipowner's legal representative, there were 1,050 25-kilogram bags, totaling about 26 tons, traveling in a container and left floating. Many have broken in the water, and those that have arrived unscathed on the Galician beaches have a written indication of their contents: it is a “UV stabilizer” of type “UV 9000”, used as an additive during manufacture all types of products are used. Plastics. The Xunta de Galicia has announced that this week the results of the analyzes will be announced and it will be known what the white balls are made of and to what extent they are dangerous.
“Family, one of the biggest environmental disasters of recent times is occurring in Galicia,” a boy who loves water sports begins his intervention in a Facebook video. “For a few weeks now, millions of microplastics have been landing on all the beaches of our coast,” the young man explains attentively, “and there is a more serious problem: no one can do anything about it.” Many of us have tried to collect them ourselves, and it is not easy at all. It's impossible and more and more are coming.” Humberto Less, another environmental activist on Facebook, assures that spilled pellets are “the closest thing to an oil tanker wreck,” except that they go unnoticed and only come to light when people discover the material on the beaches. “The fish often mistake these balls for food. Let us give it the echo it deserves,” he asks his followers in the face of the flood that is arriving in Galicia. Simón Pardiñas speaks on Instagram from Riazor beach in A Coruña. Instead of white balls, he focuses in extreme close-up on hundreds of “pieces of plastic, trash and garbage” of all colors among the algae, from bottles to dental floss brushes. “Let’s see if this serves to make people aware that the sea is not a landfill,” he concludes, “but the greatest treasure we have.”
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