Majorcan mission to help claen up Galicia

The group of 170 Balearic volunteers have already started work on their second day helping to clean up the beaches hit by the Prestige oil spill in Galicia. The volunteers left Palma for Galicia at 6.30 yesterday and by lunch time, had already been kitted out with protective suits, breathing masks, gloves, spades, rakes and buckets, and deployed to the beaches after a breakfast provided by the army in special cook houses set up for the thousands of volunteers now working in the disaster area. All of the volunteers, the majority aged between 25 and 35 and students, will spend the week in Galicia, sleeping in sports centres which have been transformed into huge camps for aid workers. A 20-strong team of Civil Protection members also set off from Palma for the stricken north west of Spain which was yesterday buffeted by 100 kilometre-per-hour winds which at times hampered the clean up operation. The central government delegate to the Balearics and the local government, awaiting further instructions and demands from the government in Galicia, is ready to send more volunteers and aid to the region. Yesterday the Balearic government brought public and private institutions together for crisis talks in order to set up a Galicia help control centre to co-ordinate efforts in the Balearics to help the people of Galicia. A small 12-strong team of Young Socialists from Majorca who have been working in the region since the middle of last week as part of a group of over 200 young Socialists from across Spain, returned home yesterday to the Balearics.