Cousteau film to focus on oil spill

Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, hopes to capture the devastation of last month’s massive oil spill in northwestern Spain on film for a possible documentary, the oceanographer and environmentalist said.

The film team of his Santa Barbara-based Ocean Futures Society plans to focus on the residents, workers and fishermen of A Coruna, a town on the Galician coast. The tanker Prestige broke in two and sank Nov. 19, about a week after it ruptured in a storm. Officials estimate it spilled just under a quarter of its 77,000 tons of fuel oil.

Cousteau hopes the film can educate the public and force governments to remove aging and obsolete oil tankers from the ocean. “Thousands and thousands of people are completely out of work because they were completely dependent on the ocean for their way of living,” he said.