What comes after the Prestige disaster? An entropic approach to modeling the recurrence of major oil tanker spills in Galicia.

A methodology is presented to investigate the recurrence of extraordinary events. The approach is fully general and complies with a canon of inference establishing a set of basic rationality requirements scientific reasoning should satisfy. In particular, we apply it to model the interarrival time between disastrous oil spills in the Galician coast in the northwest of Spain, one of the greatest risk areas in the world, as confirmed by the Prestige accident of November 2002.