The appearance of a water inlet in the engine room of the ship OS 35, stranded off Gibraltar since last Monday after colliding with a gas tanker in the Bay of Algeciras, is making it difficult to extract the 126 tons of heavy fuel oil contained in tank 1 of the ship. According to sources from the Gibraltarian Government, the entry of water is assuming that the ship’s own systems cannot be used to pump the fuel, so the rescuers will have to resort to systems at this stage. outside the ship. The diving teams deployed on the east face of the Rock are investigating the origin of the water ingress, although they estimate that said entry is “under control”. For their part, the aforementioned sources point out that already Most of the 96 tonnes of heavy fuel oil contained in tank 2 has been successfully removed, although water ingress into the engine room is also slowing down the last fas e of these works. In parallel, the Spanish Maritime Rescue ship Clara Campoamor is working on the deployment of 1 kilometer of anti-pollution barrier around the OS 35, while the placement of new barriers is planned at other points near the ship to act as containment against possible spills derived from the pumping of the tank 1.Gibraltar has admitted that the leaking of “small residual amounts” of fuel into the sea “is inevitable”, since “while the rescuers wait to be able to remove the fuel from the ship, the tanks they will still be dirty. “The deployment of layered booms around the ship will prevent the maximum amount of seepage into open water, but it will not provide an airtight containment layer, which is not technologically possible to provide,” they say. “This is the unfortunate but unavoidable situation arising from this incident. Therefore, this situation will continue for the rest of the summer and until the rescue operation is completed,” government sources warn. On the other hand, they have reported that a small catamaran boat, designed for this type of work during the 24 hours hours of the day, goes to Gibraltar from Cádiz to defoam the remains of oil that are already dumped into the sea, and that have generated a hydrocarbon slick around the Rock, generating black residue on the beaches of Gibraltar and La Línea de the conception.