The Torrey Canyon oil spill was one of the world's most serious oil spills. The supertanker ran aground on rocks off the south-west coast of the United Kingdom in 1967, spilling an estimated 25–36 million gallons (94–164 million litres) of crude oil. Attempts to mitigate the damage included the bombing of the wreck by aircraft from the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. Hundreds of miles of coastline in Britain, France, Guernsey, and Spain were affected by the oil and other substances used to mitigate damage. It was the world's worst oil spill and led to significant changes in maritime law and oil spill responses.
Background
When laid down in the United States in 1959, Torrey Canyon had a capacity of 60,000 tons; the ship was later enlarged to 120,000 tons in Japan. She was named for a geographical feature in California. Torrey Canyon was registered in Liberia and owned by Barracuda Tanker Corporation, a subsidiary of Union Oil Company of California but chartered to British Petroleum. She was long, beam and draught.
Accident
On her final voyage, Torrey Canyon left the Kuwait National Petroleum Company refinery at Mina Al-Ahmadi, Kuwait (later Al-Ahmadi), with a full cargo of crude oil, on 19 February 1967. The ship had an intended destination of Milford Haven in Wales. On 14 March, she reached the Canary Islands. Following a navigational error, Torrey Canyon struck Pollard's Rock on the extreme Western end of the Seven Stones between the Cornish mainland and the Isles of Scilly on 18 March 1967.
The tanker did not have a scheduled route and so lacked a complement of full l-scale charts of the Scilly Islands. When a collision with a fishing fleet became imminent, there was some confusion between the Master and the officer of the watch as to their exact position. Significant further delay arose due to uncertainty as to whether the vessel was in manual or automatic steering mode, with the Master mistakenly believing he had switched the steering to manual for the helmsman. By the time the problem was corrected, a grounding was unavoidable. In the hours and days to follow, extensive attempts to float the vessel off the reef failed and even resulted in the death of a member of the Dutch salvage team, Captain Hans Barend Stal.
After the attempts to move the vessel failed and the ship began to break up, the focus became the clean up and containment of the resulting oil spill. Huge amounts of detergent was used by Cornwall fire brigade and attending Royal Navy vessels to try to disperse the oil. UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his cabinet held a mini cabinet meeting at the Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose and decided to set fire to the vessel and surrounding oil slick to limit the extent of the oil disaster.
On 28 March 1967, the Fleet Air Arm sent Blackburn Buccaneer planes from RNAS Lossiemouth to drop forty-two bombs on the ship. Then, the Royal Air Force sent Hawker Hunter jets from RAF Chivenor to drop cans of aviation fuel to make the oil blaze. Exceptionally high tides put the fire out and it took further bombing runs by Sea Vixens from the RNAS Yeovilton and Buccaneers from the Royal Navy Air Station Brawdy, as well as more RAF Hunters with liquefied petroleum jelly (napalm) to ignite the oil. Bombing continued into the next day before Torrey Canyon finally sank. About 161 bombs, of kerosene, of napalm and 16 other missiles had been aimed at the ship. Attempts to use foam-filled containment booms were mostly ineffectual because of the high seas.
Environmental impact
About of French and of Cornish coast were contaminated. Around 15,000 sea birds were killed, along with huge numbers of marine organisms, before the slick dispersed. Much damage was caused by the heavy use of so-called detergents to break up the slick – these were first-generation variants of products originally formulated to clean surfaces in ships' engine-rooms, with no concern over the toxicity of their components. Many observers believed that they were officially referred to as 'detergents', rather than the more accurate 'solvent-emulsifiers', to encourage comparison with much more benign domestic cleaning products.