Torrey Canyon — What Happened?
The Disaster That Changed the Way the World Looked at Oil Pollution
On the morning of 18 March 1967, a huge oil tanker was approaching Britain carrying almost 120,000 tonnes of crude oil from Kuwait.
Her destination was Milford Haven in Wales.
She never arrived.
Instead, the Torrey Canyon struck Pollard’s Rock on the Seven Stones reef, between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly, tearing open her cargo tanks and beginning what would become one of the defining maritime environmental disasters of the twentieth century.
At the time, the world had never dealt with an oil spill on anything approaching this scale.
Nobody really knew what to do.
And that would become almost as important as the grounding itself.
A Supertanker on the Rocks
Torrey Canyon represented the rapidly changing face of the tanker industry.
Oil consumption was increasing dramatically, tankers were becoming larger, and the economics of carrying crude encouraged ever greater cargoes.
When Torrey Canyon grounded on 18 March, approximately 30,000 tonnes of oil escaped almost immediately.
The situation deteriorated over the following days.
The ship remained trapped on the reef while Atlantic weather worked relentlessly against her damaged structure. More tanks ruptured and more oil entered the sea.
Then, on 26 March, the vessel broke apart.
Around another 50,000 tonnes of crude were released.
Eventually, almost the entire cargo was either spilled into the sea or destroyed during attempts to deal with the wreck. (Cefas)
The slicks spread across enormous areas of water.
Cornwall was directly in their path.
So too, eventually, were parts of the Channel Islands and the coast of France.
Britain Faced a Problem It Had Never Seen Before
Today an incident involving a tanker and a major release of oil would immediately activate established pollution-response organisations, equipment, contingency plans and international arrangements.
In March 1967, much of that simply did not exist.
The Torrey Canyon disaster became an emergency conducted partly through improvisation.
Royal Navy vessels, fishing boats, local authorities, government departments, soldiers, Royal Marines, scientists and civilian volunteers were drawn into the response.
Oil began reaching the Cornish coast.
Beaches, coves and rocky shorelines were coated in black crude.
Wildlife became contaminated.
And officials urgently searched for some means of stopping still more oil from coming ashore.
One of their principal weapons was detergent.
Large quantities were sprayed both at sea and along contaminated shorelines in an attempt to break up the oil.
More than 50 vessels were involved in spraying operations at one stage. (UK Parliament API)
But another problem was becoming apparent.
Some of the chemicals being used to attack the oil could themselves damage marine life.
The response to one environmental emergency was capable of creating another.
It was an extraordinarily important lesson, learned the hard way.
Then Britain Bombed the Ship
Of all the images associated with Torrey Canyon, this remains perhaps the most extraordinary.
The British Government eventually decided that the remaining oil aboard the wreck should be burned.
That meant deliberately attacking the tanker.
On 28 March 1967, aircraft of the Fleet Air Arm bombed Torrey Canyon shortly before four o’clock in the afternoon.
RAF aircraft then dropped aviation fuel in an attempt to keep the resulting fires burning.
It did not entirely work.
The fire died down and further attacks were required during the following two days to rupture and burn the remaining oil tanks. (Hansard)
Britain had effectively declared war on a shipwreck.
Bombs, incendiaries and aviation fuel were being used against an oil tanker sitting on a reef just off the Cornish coast because the authorities had run out of conventional answers.
It sounds almost unbelievable today.
In 1967, it was considered one of the few remaining options.
The Oil Came Ashore
Despite the enormous response, much of the pollution could not be stopped.
Oil contaminated long stretches of the south-western coastline and reached parts of France and the Channel Islands.
People who lived through it remembered blackened beaches, the smell of crude oil, contaminated rocks and huge efforts to clean places which had previously appeared almost untouched.
Birds were particularly visible victims.
Thousands became coated in oil.
Marine organisms living along the shoreline were exposed both to the crude and to the chemicals used during the clean-up.
The disaster became more than a shipping casualty.
It became an environmental event witnessed by millions through newspapers and television.
For many people, Torrey Canyon was the moment oil pollution stopped being an obscure maritime problem and became something the general public could actually see.
Who Was Responsible?
Then came another uncomfortable discovery.
The law had not kept pace with the ships.
Torrey Canyon raised extraordinarily difficult questions concerning ownership, flag state, chartering arrangements, responsibility for pollution, the powers of coastal governments and — perhaps most importantly — who should pay when an oil spill damaged people and places having nothing whatsoever to do with the ship itself.
Existing maritime law was much better equipped to deal with traditional casualties such as collisions between ships than with hundreds of miles of contaminated coastline.
The International Maritime Organization regards Torrey Canyon as the catalyst for major international work on oil-pollution liability and compensation.
The disaster eventually contributed to the 1969 Civil Liability Convention and the 1971 Fund Convention, creating a far more coherent system for compensating victims of tanker pollution. (International Maritime Organization)
The Disaster Changed Shipping
Torrey Canyon also changed something much larger.
It helped force governments and the international shipping industry to recognise that a major tanker casualty could create environmental consequences extending far beyond the vessel itself.
IMO began intensive work on preventing and responding to pollution from ships.
The chain of developments that followed Torrey Canyon contributed eventually to the creation of MARPOL, the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships — today one of the fundamental international instruments governing marine pollution. (IMO)
Even IMO itself changed.
Its Legal Committee was originally established in 1967 specifically to deal with the legal questions raised by Torrey Canyon before becoming a permanent part of the organisation. (International Maritime Organization)
That gives some measure of the disaster’s importance.
One ship grounding on a granite reef helped reshape international maritime environmental law.
But Why Did Torrey Canyon Hit the Reef?
That is where the story becomes considerably more interesting than the familiar photographs of oil-covered beaches and burning wreckage.
Torrey Canyon was not lost in an unknown ocean.
The Seven Stones were charted.
The danger was known.
The weather was not an irresistible force capable of overwhelming the ship.
Yet one of the largest tankers afloat still steamed onto Pollard’s Rock.
To understand why requires looking beyond the moment of impact.
It means examining the ship’s passage planning, navigation, decision-making on the bridge, the pressures surrounding the voyage and a sequence of seemingly manageable choices which gradually removed the margin for recovery.
As with so many major maritime disasters, the final collision with the rocks was merely the last event in a chain that had already been developing.
And once Torrey Canyon struck, another investigation begins:
Why was Britain so badly prepared for what followed?
The oil, the detergents, the bombing, the political decisions, the environmental destruction and the extraordinary legal aftermath together transformed a shipwreck into something much larger.
The Legacy of Torrey Canyon
Nearly sixty years later, Torrey Canyon occupies an unusual place in maritime history.
Nobody died in the disaster itself.
There was no enormous passenger death toll.
There was no dramatic sinking beneath thousands of metres of water.
Yet its consequences travelled around the world.
It demonstrated what could happen when the increasing size of oil tankers collided with inadequate pollution planning, uncertain international law and technologies that had advanced faster than the systems intended to regulate them.
The wreck eventually disappeared beneath the sea.
Its consequences did not.
Modern tanker regulation, pollution-response planning, environmental protection and compensation regimes all carry, somewhere within their history, the lessons learned off Cornwall in March 1967.
Torrey Canyon was not simply an oil spill.
It was the disaster that forced the maritime world to recognise that when a tanker goes wrong, the casualty does not necessarily end at the ship’s side.
Sometimes an entire coastline becomes part of the wreck.
Torrey Canyon — The Investigation
In my forthcoming investigation of the Torrey Canyon disaster, I return to the events of March 1967 and reconstruct the casualty from the tanker’s approach to the Seven Stones through the grounding, the desperate attempts to control the spill, the extraordinary decision to bomb the wreck and the international reforms that followed.
The investigation asks not only what happened, but the more important question:
Why was Torrey Canyon allowed to happen — and why was the world so unprepared for what came next?