an unprestigious end for the oil tanker Prestige

"The environmental devastation caused is at least on a par, if not worse, than the Exxon Valdez. The amount of oil spilled is more than the Valdez and the toxicity is higher, because of the higher temperatures." ~Simon Walmsley, World Wildlife Fund's senior policy officer for shipping

Prestige was a single-hulled oil tanker with a length overall of 243 metres (797 ft), a beam of 34.4 metres (113 ft), a hull depth of 18.7 metres (61 ft), and a draft of 14 metres (46 ft). It had a gross tonnage (GT) of 42,820 tons and a total cargo capacity of 81,589 metric tons deadweight (DWT). Vessels of this size are classified as Aframax-class tankers. The ship was built by Hitachi Shipbuilding and Engineering Co., Japan, and completed in 1976.

The Prestige was Greek-operated, officially registered in the Bahamas, but with a Liberian-registered single-purpose corporation as the owner. On 13 November 2002, while the Prestige was carrying 77,033 metric tons of two different grades of heavy fuel oil, one of the twelve tanks burst during a storm off Galicia, in northwestern Spain. Six days later the ship split in two.  More than 63,000 of the tanker's 77,000 tons of fuel oil are now thought to have been spilled off Spain's north-west coast which polluted thousands of kilometers of coastline and more than 1,000 beaches on the Spanish, French and Portuguese coasts, as well as causing great harm to the local fishing industry. The spill is the largest environmental disaster of both Spain's history and Portugal's history.

Spanish investigators concluded that the failure in the Prestige's hull was entirely predictable and indeed had been predicted already.