Men work to clean up an oil spill from a beach.
IN March 1967, the world’s press highlighted the SS Torrey Canyon disaster, when a supertanker was wrecked, spilling between 94 and 164 million litres of crude oil into the seas off the Cornish coast in South West England.
Coming from the Kuwait oilfields to the deep water terminal in Milford Haven in West Wales, through navigational errors it took a shorter course, and hit Pollard’s reef just off Land’s End. At that time, any oil tanker greater than 100,000 tonnes was classed as a supertanker, which cruised at 17 knots per hour and took a distance of 7.5km to stop. Today, most-ocean going tankers are greater than 300,000 tonnes.
Upon hitting the granite reef the Torrey Canyon broke her back, emitting crude oil at a very fast rate. With the prevailing winds and tidal currents, a series of giant oil slicks of greenish brown sludge formed on the sea surface.
That March I was at home in West Cornwall for my university’s Easter vacation, busily writing up my degree dissertation on the geography of that region. With the radio on for the latest BBC news, I heard that the Royal Air Force were sending in Hawker Hunter jetfighters to bomb the tanker, and more importantly to ignite the oil slick.
Hastily abandoning my work, I leapt on my 50 cc motorbike and rode to the top of a granite hill at Chapel Carn Brea to survey the scene. I literally had a bird’s eye view as the aircraft swept low overhead, then dived down to release their bombs. Other types of aircraft had been used the previous day with little success. This time the jets dropped napalm (naphthalene palmitate) bombs, which produced flames and a column of black smoke for no longer than 10 minutes then fizzling out like a damp firework!
It was the summer tourist industry in this economically deprived part of England that had forced the then government into taking action for a national emergency. If the crude oil was washed up onto the hundreds of beaches in this delightful region of Cornwall, the tourism trade would take an unrecoverable dive.
Napalm and Southeast Asia
Only a few days before all this, a most emotionally disturbing picture appeared in all the world’s newspapers and on TV of a very young, naked girl running up a road with tears in her eyes, having been badly burnt by napalm bombs dropped during the latter stages of the Vietnam War. Fortunately, she was taken to a USA field hospital and, thanks to extensive surgery, many years later she is now a doctor in Canada.
The day that her photograph was released in the British press, a concerned MP in the House of Commons asked the then Prime Minister, during Question Time, whether Britain held any napalm bombs in this country. The reply was, “No!” A day later, napalm bombs were imported from US and British airbases in the then West Germany and used on the oil slicks! This was a period in history which is now often forgotten – the Cold War.
Cleaning up the damage
Inquisitively, to see how the beaches ‘clean up’ operations were in progress, I ventured on to a huge sandy beach at Sennen Cove, only about 5km from where the Torrey Canyon met its fate. This spot is a major beach for swimmers and surfers in summer time.
The yellow sands looked fine, but as soon as my shoes touched the surface they were devoured by a quicksand effect and plastered in an oily slime embedded beneath the sand’s surface.
Suffice to say, my shoes were ruined. Huge globules of crude oil, in tar form, lay beneath the surface of newly washed-in sand on that tide. Smudges of oil were evident on all rocks and in rock pools at low tide. It was a site of marine life devastation.
Army and local volunteers could be seen spraying the rocks with detergents; some were shovelling up barrel-loads of tar while bulldozers ploughed others areas of the beach to scoop up a mixture of crude oil and sand. However, tidal and sea current movements did not stop just on this beach, for they conveyed the crude oil across to the Isles of Scilly, to the Channel Islands and onto the French coast.
The SS Torrey Canyon split in two with oil slicks off Land’s End, England.
First oil disaster in modern history
The Torrey Canyon disaster alerted the world to the huge damage costs that oil spills can cause not only to local economies but, as importantly, to marine life. Never before had such a massive spillage of crude oil into a marine environment occurred.
Scientists scratched their heads as to how this still moving oil slick could be contained and how its spillages onto the coastline could be cleaned up. The 700 square km oil slick was sprayed with 10,000 tonnes of detergent, which sadly consisted of no more than emulsifiers that were toxic to marine life.
The bulldozers at Sennen Cove were used to bury the tennis ball sized globules of crude oil under the sand but with the inevitable tidal movements these kept appearing from beneath the sand for very many years afterwards.
Effects on marine life
From a rich underwater environment, through the combination of crude oil and the toxic chemicals used to disperse it, a marine desert, devoid of sea-life was created almost overnight.
Over 25,000 seabirds perished and another 10,000 were taken to numerous bird rescue hospitals to have their feathers cleaned of the oil contamination.
Commercial oyster beds were polluted and all beaches between Cornwall and the Atlantic coast of France were affected by the destruction of even the smallest forms of marine life.
This chocolate mousse-like emulsification of oil, chemicals and seawater destroyed brown and green seaweeds – the shelter of many fish species – and rock barnacles for the next 20 years. Annual fish migrations sensed the damage that had been caused locally in inshore Cornish waters, thus depriving local fishermen of their income.
Last month, some 50 years after this disaster, a particular species of hermit crab has been observed again in Cornish rock pools. It was once prevalent.
The SS Amoco Cadiz is seen broken up off the Brittany coast in France.
What lessons were learned?
Exactly 11 years later, in March 1978, an even bigger crude oil loss occurred when the SS Amoco Cadiz was shipwrecked off the granite coastline of Brittany, France. This is still today the world’s biggest ever oil spillage disaster.
Oil spills do occur frequently from offshore oil platforms and other smaller oil tankers, all leading to massive losses in marine life and to subsequent losses in the fishing industry and the tourist trade of local communities.
Nonetheless, lessons have been learned since March 1967. The actual design of oil tankers now faces very stringent regulations. Oil companies have established research centres to combat oil spillages without using toxic chemicals to disperse an oil slick.
Bacteria that feed on crude oil can now be dispersed in disaster areas and these break down the oil. The use of chalk chippings coagulates the oil collecting behind newly invented floating plastic oil containment booms, with associated suction processes then syphoning out the slick into other tankers.
Most importantly international legislation has been established to sue the culprits of any further disasters and the ‘washing out’ or cleaning of empty oil tanks at sea is now banned.
From this Tuesday until Friday, the 10th International Chemical and Oil Pollution Conference and Exhibition will be held in Singapore. Hopefully it will bring together many more modern ideas of controlling pollution to marine life.
Today in 2017, we are in a better position to prevent and cope with oil spillages. Perhaps the Torrey Canyon disaster in March 1967 with its devastating effect on marine life, was a wake-up call to us all. That said, all ships remain at the mercy of the elements, from the air and on the high seas.
Photo shows a bird coated in crude oil.