Belgium Fights Slick From Wreck

Belgium launched an emergency clean-up operation yesterday after a sunken cargo ship submerged in the North Sea leaked some 100 tonnes of heavy oil.

The Tricolor, which sank carrying a cargo of luxury cars last year after colliding with another vessel in thick fog about 20 miles north of Dunkirk, is in the process of being salvaged.

But the unusual salvage operation involves a high risk of pollution.

The ship is being cut into nine separate chunks which are individually refloated and then towed to shore and that, say experts, means many fuel lines are being cut inadvertently.

A small fleet of Belgian anti-pollution ships sped to the spill yesterday while a reconnaissance aircraft circled overhead.

The salvage company said it had stopped the leak and the Belgian coastguard claimed last night that the worst appeared to be over, with the slick reduced to about 50 metres (165ft) by six miles, a quarter of its original size.

"Much of the oil stain is gone," said Sigrid Maebe, a spokeswoman for the Belgian maritime authorities told AP.

The slick was shrinking all the time, she said, and much of the oil had either sunk to the seabed or broken up.

That, she said, made recovery impossible but also cut the risk of an environmental catastrophe unless a heavy storm stirred things up.

But ecologists were less optimistic.

"We have to cross our fingers and hope that the north-east wind which is keeping the pollution off our beaches doesn't change direction," one expert told the daily newspaper Le Soir.