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2002-11-19 · Off Galicia, Spain · Aframax crude oil tanker · Bahamas flag
The 26-year-old Bahamas-flagged single-hull tanker Prestige suffered a hull-plate failure in a Force-9 gale off Galicia on 13 November 2002. Cracks opened in her starboard tanks and she began listing and shedding oil. Over the following six days, Spanish, French, and Portuguese authorities each refused her a place of refuge, fearing spill contamination of their own coasts. She was towed further and further offshore until she broke in two on 19 November, 200 km west of Vigo, spilling most of her 77,000-tonne HFO cargo. The 'places of refuge' controversy — the coastal-state right to refuse refuge to a stricken vessel — was directly addressed by IMO Resolution A.949(23) (2003), which established the international framework requiring coastal states to designate refuge locations in advance.
Prestige forced the industry to confront the 'places of refuge' gap. A master facing a hull-integrity emergency now has a legal framework to invoke — pre-declared refuge locations in each coastal state, plus the 2004 EU Directive on maritime traffic monitoring. The case also drove the P&I Group's post-Prestige position on catastrophic-hull-failure claims: modern P&I cover is contingent on hull-condition documentation that was optional under the pre-Prestige regime.
EU Regulation 417/2002 accelerated to phase out single-hull tankers by 2005 (originally 2015). MARPOL Annex I amended (MEPC 105) to prohibit HFO in single-hull tankers over 15 years old. Established Erika/Prestige-era EMSA (European Maritime Safety Agency).