It was obvious the ship was in dire trouble. She was foundering like a cork in the tide, her entire superstructure intermittently disappearing as one barrage of waves after another broke over the deck, engulfing her in frothing, foaming jaws.

But between each mighty surge the ship miraculously reappeared, only to be marked by plumes of thick black smoke pouring from the hold. The acrid fumes filled the inside of the ship, forcing the crew up onto the open deck and directly into the sea’s savage path. Like wretches they clung for dear life to the railing, trapped in a living hell.

It wasn’t until after nightfall that the ship’s captain gave the order to lower the lifeboats - some sections of the deck railing were starting to melt as the fire below continued to rage. It was a futile order. The quarter boats were immediately capsized or devoured by the raging sea as soon as they hit the water. Terrified mariners, left with no other option, leapt over the railing, following the dinghies into the roaring black void.

Although two tugboats managed to reach the stricken ship and tow her back to Whangarei Harbour the following day, seven of those on board the Captain Bourganville lost their lives that stormy night in the mid-seventies. The captain, for his part in choosing to risk the voyage in the treacherous sea-state, not only lost his job, but he lost his wife and daughter too.

As a coastal resident overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the eyewitness who recounted this harrowing tale has a memory full of shipping sagas. His most recent report was of a near disaster just before Christmas last year. North of Whangarei, perched on a cliff high above the ocean raging to the tune of a southeasterly storm, he recalls observing a large freighter approaching from the south through the passage between the Poor Knights Islands and the coast.

"The ship appeared to be moving closer and closer to shore and eventually passed my position no more than about a mile off the coast. As it passed it looked as though it was having steering difficulty – trying to bear away from the shore – because the swell was so big that the prop could easily be seen coming clear out of the water."

As the story goes, the freighter narrowly avoided running aground on the craggy coast but, as the witness says, "the captain would surely have been sweating".

A string of recent shipping accidents provide some element of evidence. In February last year the Jody F Millennium ran aground near Gisborne in large seas. Six months later the fishing vessel June sank at Halfmoon Bay on Stewart Island after hitting rocks. Then in October the bulk carrier Tai Ping ran aground in heavy fog at Tiwai Point, near the entrance to Bluff Harbour.

These were just some of the high profile local incidents that made headlines last year, generally brought to the public’s attention because of the potential environmental threats posed by oil and fuel leaks.

But, a little over a month prior to Christmas, an overseas shipping disaster dominated national media attention for days. After being battered by an Atlantic Ocean storm, an aging oil tanker, the Prestige, snapped in half more than 300km off the northwest Spanish coast. The tanker took most of its 77,000 tonnes of fuel oil 3.6km to the ocean floor where it continues to seep from the wreck three months after it went down.

Numerous giant oil slicks have washed ashore since the ship sank, polluting more than 400km of the Spanish coastline. More recently though, high winds have broken up other major slicks and blown hundreds of thousands of foul-smelling globs of oil on to the popular sandy beaches of France’s Bordeaux region.

Environmental organisations have estimated that the first slick contained 20,000 tonnes of oil. A second slick was judged to be twice the size. Innumerable fish, seabirds and ocean mammals have already been killed by the pollution, and the spill has also decimated the Spanish fishing industry. Now officials predict that more oil deposits are on the way to France, some covering an area the size of New York City.

The ongoing environmental disaster the French and Spanish authorities are fighting now makes the 25 tonne spill of the Jody F Millennium pale into insignificance. Although no final sum has yet been released, the Maritime Safety Authority (MSA) calculated that the first two and a half weeks of the Jody spill-response cost over $1.4 million and that the figure was rising daily. In Europe, the French Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin has pledged $100 million to the Prestige mop-up operation.

Although none of the recent shipping incidents in New Zealand have had significant or lasting environmental effects, the scale of which can be seen in France and Spain, the Prestige spill has prompted one of this country’s most well-known marine conservationists to warn that a similar catastrophe is waiting to happen right here in our waters.

Northland diver, author and marine conservationist Wade Doak recently went public with his concerns that it is only a matter of time before New Zealand has to cope with a Prestige-style disaster. In an article penned for the Herald he wrote: "The risk of a major oil-spill on the New Zealand coast has never been greater."

What has prompted Doak’s dire predictions are the "distinct parallels" between Spain and New Zealand.

"What’s happening in Spain is interesting because it’s on the opposite side of the world – it’s antipodal. Everything that’s happening is in our latitude. They’re reliant on their fishing industry; they’ve got similar exposed coastline and weather. Those are some of the parallels."

The MSA says about 75-80 foreign oil tankers call at the Marsden Point oil refinery each year, which averages roughly one ship every four days. These vessels travel down Northland’s east coast to reach the refinery and unload their cargo. Doak believes that the law of averages suggests the conditions that drove the Captain Bourganville or the Jody F Millennium into dire trouble will catch a tanker unaware sooner or later.

"As I see it, it will be a big cyclone in summer. Now that season [cyclone season] runs right through to April and with that amount of tanker traffic the chances of having a ship out there when there’s a cyclone is very, very high," he says.

"Tankers have been averaging one major Prestige-style disaster every 15 months in Europe. That’s how bad it is. So how the hell do we think we can sit out on this? We can’t."

A simple Internet search shows that the recent safety record of international oil tanker shipments is as questionable as Doak suggests. Some of the more noteworthy incidents include the Ecuadorian tanker that grounded on the Galapagos Islands dumping more than 900,000 litres of heavy diesel fuel. In July last year a Papua New Guinea registered oil tanker grounded on a reef near a tourist resort in Fiji. Then, a fortnight after the Prestige sank, a Panamanian tanker carrying 20,000 tonnes of inflammable gas caught on fire and was abandoned. The same day, the Singaporean owned Tasman Sea collided with a fishing boat off the Chinese coast. The ship, carrying 80 000 tonnes of crude oil disgorged a huge slick into the Bohai Sea. The list goes on and on …

Admittedly there were a number of different factors behind these incidents – human error and navigational glitches were responsible in some cases, adverse weather conditions in other instances. Regardless though, figures from the Institute of London Underwriters show that more than 80 percent of insurance losses have involved ships built more than 15 years ago. Clearly this indicates that the older a tanker gets the higher are its chances of being wrecked.

Doak says this correlation becomes even more startling when you consider that two-thirds of the world’s tanker fleet is now more than 10 years old, and that these vessels are frequenting our waters.

Northern Hemisphere governments have recognised the link between older ships and spills for some years but the Prestige provided a poignant reminder that more needs to be done to prevent further catastrophes.

The Prestige was one of the old single-hull vessels – unlike modern tankers with double-hulls, the cargo of oil leaks directly from the hold if the hull is ruptured or damaged. A double-hull ship has a separate or second hull encasing the hold. This affords added protection and reduced risk of spilling oil.

British politicians are now calling for a ban on tankers more than 15 years old and want double-hulled vessels to be mandatory, as is the case in the United States (the Americans incorporated a ban on single-hull tankers after the 1990 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska).

France has also campaigned forcefully for stricter European Union rules on oil tanker safety following an oil spill disaster off the coast of Brittany two years ago, and even threatened a unilateral ban on all single-hull tankers. In response, the European Commission proposed to phase in a ban on the vessels over 10 years starting from 2005. Effectively, by 2015 only double-hull tankers will be shipping in European waters.

John Lee-Richards, Divisional Manager of the MSA National Oil Spill Service Centre, says MSA has a well established marine oil spill-response strategy developed on international best practice. He would not comment directly on whether or not New Zealand could handle a Prestige size spill because "there are a number of variables in any spill which dictate our ability to mount an effective response".

"We have adequate resources and structures in place for a first response to any size of oil spill. In the event of an extremely large oil spill, New Zealand would seek assistance from its overseas partners. This is how just about every country in the world operates. Most, like New Zealand, are signatories to an international convention - OPRC. This requires and obliges the provision of mutual assistance in the event of a major oil spill," he says.

While Doak praises the oil response team’s high level of training and equipment, he believes there are flaws in the established system.

"When he was questioned on the television news about whether such a disaster could happen here, the head of the MSA told us that we had nothing to worry about. In actual fact, that’s not the case," says Doak.

"We do have great equipment and the MSA people have had excellent training but with that equipment it is limited by a number of parameters. For instance, certain weather conditions can render it completely ineffectual.

"What’s happening in Spain is that they’ve got the power of Europe behind them but they still can’t get that oil cleaned up. In one respect, we are lucky not sharing the problems of other countries around us, but at the same time our isolation puts us in a very vulnerable situation. The Prestige had the world’s biggest super-tug hanging onto it and pulling it out to sea, even in that huge storm. My point is that they have the resources of their neighbours close at hand but if we need assistance we’re three or four days voyage away and in storm conditions that’s too long to wait.

"Just because we’re a small country doesn’t mean they send us small tankers – they send supertankers, single-skin too. We’re right in the gun. We’ve got away with it so far but it would be foolish to expect that to continue."

A major oil spill is the single worst disaster that could hit New Zealand according to Doak. He says that although national cataclysms like earthquakes, eruptions, fires and floods are beyond human control; they are relatively easier to deal with than large-scale oil spills.

"The social, economic and environmental consequences of a spill the size of the Prestige disaster are almost unthinkable."

It has been estimated that around 400km of the Spanish coastline has been affected by the Prestige spill. Doak hypothesises that if a similar spill occurred off the Northland coast – say a tanker broke up off the Bay of Islands – a black tide would smother the shore from Cape Brett to the Bay of Plenty. New Zealand has one of the longest coastlines in the world, roughly the same as that of continental United States, and because of the rugged nature of the area, Doak says a cleanup would be near impossible.

Residents living close to where the Jody F Millennium spill washed ashore had to be evacuated from their homes because the nauseating fumes became overwhelming – that was a relatively small spill. Doak says a major spill would have shattering economic consequences because coastal locales would be turned into ghost towns.

"I don’t know how far inshore the aerosol pollution would go but the coast would probably be uninhabitable – you can’t breathe the stuff. Imagine how that would affect the business hub of Auckland when the pollution gets trapped in the Waitemata Harbour bottleneck.

"Throw in all the tourism, the farming, fishing and forestry – yeah, the economic consequences would be crippling for a small country like this."

This scenario paints a grim picture, but is there any chance of such a spill actually occurring? Clearly, Doak says yes – "we’re playing Russian Roulette" – but even Lee-Richards of MSA admits, "a major oil spill could happen in New Zealand".

Doak says that is proof that the current MSA strategy has too much focus on reactive measures and more emphasis needs to be placed on preventing such a disaster. Most of the world’s oil tanker fleet are single-hull vessels and Doak is pragmatic about the demand and supply problems associated with a blanket ban on those tankers. However, he believes we should adopt a regime, similar to Norway, whereby inspectors assess the vessels at their point of departure for New Zealand.

"It seems daft having an inspector living in Whangarei when we’re regularly taking oil from Indonesia. Why the hell can’t he have his salary and live over there?"

Additionally, Doak suggests only the highest quality ships (recently built, double-hull vessels) should be allowed to enter our waters during the cyclone season. He also says a system of controlling and monitoring coastal shipping with ground radar could dramatically reduce the risk of collision and grounding, and ensure that ships don’t travel through restricted areas – a scheme that would be significantly more cost efficient to implement than cleaning up a major spill.

But Lee-Richards backs the MSA strategy saying that not only is shipping traffic in New Zealand waters substantially lighter than around Europe, "which reduces the risk of major oil spills occurring," but the inspection systems in place are more than the proverbial ambulance at the bottom of the cliff.

"The oil companies that bring oil to New Zealand are required to have a satisfactory pre-charter inspection carried out on any vessel intending to come to the Marsden Point oil refinery.

"A safety inspection is carried out on all foreign tankers when they first arrive at a New Zealand port. Vessels that do not meet our safety and marine environment protection standards can be detained."

He also points out that New Zealand is part of an Asia/Pacific-wide inspection regime that includes the sharing of information about sub-standard ships and agreements on action to be taken if a substandard vessel is found.

Lee-Richards says because overseas administrations check vessels and provide this country with information it would be "infeasible" to send New Zealand inspectors offshore to do the job. He says the collaboration with other international bodies means "we generally have a very full and up to date picture of the history of any ship before it arrives".

But "generally" is not good enough for Doak who says there’s simply too much at stake.

"Tankers will continue to run aground because of poor navigation, there will continue to be collisions and engine room fires, there will continue to be storm damage. What we need to do is think about scenarios to stop any of those things happening to the utmost degree.

"It’s a credit to the guys at Marsden Point that we’ve got one of the best and cleanest refineries in the world, so why can’t we have the best oil spill prevention measures in the world?

"The top MSA guys in Wellington aren’t approaching it like that though and they don’t want their prestige inhibited by admitting they can’t do it.

"It’s great that, unlike Europe, New Zealand doesn’t have to share its neighbours’ problems. You know, the Spanish may get it right but then the French mightn’t. We’ve only got ourselves to blame if we don’t get it right. That gives us a wonderful sense of mastery that we should be exploiting."

Suppose we don’t have it right. The ship-spotting enthusiasts may find themselves staring down the barrel of something far more ominous than a violent vessel-destroying storm. The next wave could carry with it a devastating black tide - a sinister surge that wouldn’t recede but would linger to smash our environment and our economy like a foundering ship on the rocks.

"Sooner or later it’s going to happen," predicts Doak. "How much later? Not before oil runs out I hope. One thing’s for sure though – we’ve got loads of guns pointing at us."

Wade Doak makes it clear that he doesn’t intend to make enemies by raising these concerns. Nor does he intend to offend any person or agency. He simply believes that it is better to debate the issues in a rational manner than do nothing but wait and see if there are bullets in the gun when the trigger is pulled.