On the morning of Saturday 18 March 1967, the Torrey Canyon ran aground on Pollard's Rock between Land's End and the Isles of Scilly. Over the following days, every drop of the 119,328 tonnes of crude oil borne by this 300m-long supertanker seeped into the Atlantic. Thousands of tonnes despoiled the beaches of Cornwall – and thousands more were propelled by winds and currents across the channel towards France.
At the time it was the biggest oil spill ever, and the first involving a new generation of supertankers. Looking back, the echoes of the BP disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico are loud and eerie. The slick imperilled a beautiful and popular tourist region. Inertia and dithering were worsened by the buck-passing of multinational companies implicated in the mess. And no one knew what to do. Even BP was involved: British Petroleum chartered the vessel to bring crude to the oil refinery in Milford Haven, Wales. But the Torrey Canyon disaster is not just a history lesson; it is living proof that big oil spills plague ecosystems for decades. Forty-three years on, the crude from the Torrey Canyon is still killing wildlife on a daily basis.
The Italian captain of the Liberian-registered Torrey Canyon was blamed for stranding the tanker on a well-known set of reefs. By nightfall, an eight-mile slick had slipped from its punctured tanks. The following day it was 20 miles long. In the past, tiny coastal oil spills had been cleaned up by mixtures of solvents and emulsifiers. These were called detergents, a deceptively cosy, domestic term for what were highly toxic chemicals. Within 12 hours of the spill, the navy tried to tackle it with them. Handily for BP, it manufactured these chemicals. The government warned that the stricken ship was "a bomb" and BP, as one man involved in the clean-up operation put it, "were making a bomb, literally, both ways". More charitably, the Guardian reported: "British Petroleum, which has the Torrey Canyon on charter but does not own her (and therefore disclaims any responsibility for the oil pollution) has sent all the detergent it can lay hands on.