San Vincente del Mar, Galicia, Spain. December 2002.

When the Prestige oil tanker sank, fully laden, off the coast of Galicia in north eastern Spain her cargo soon showed up on the beaches and the rocky coast. I’d never witnessed an oil recovery operation before and I was amazed by the ‘one handful at a time’ nature of the thing. This gentleman had just spent the whole day picking lumps of crude oil off the rocks by hand. His expression says to me ‘I know a little about the true cost of oil’.