Torrey Canyon disaster – the UK's worst-ever oil spill 50 years on

Torrey Canyon Disaster (1967)

The UK’s biggest ever oil spill in 1967 taught invaluable lessons about the response to disasters, toughened up shipping safety and stirred green activism

From The Guardian by Adam Vaugham

“I saw this huge ship sailing and I thought he’s in rather close, I hope he knows what he’s doing,” recalled Gladys Perkins of the day 50 years ago, when Britain experienced its worst ever environmental disaster.
The ship was the Torrey Canyon, one of the first generation of supertankers, and it was nearing the end of a journey from Kuwait to a refinery at Milford Haven in Wales.
The BP-chartered vessel ran aground on a rock between the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End in Cornwall, splitting several of the tanks holding its vast cargo of crude oil.

The stricken oil tanker Torrey Canyon two days after she stuck fast on the notorious Seven Stones Reef, near the Isles of Scilly and Land’s End.

Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images

“I just could not believe it. They’d hit the Seven Stones [reef] in broad daylight,” said the 90-year old resident of St Martin’s, the northernmost of the isles.
What followed that night was an oil spill eight-miles long which grew to 20 miles long within 24 hours, and later hit hundreds of miles of coastline.

Following a navigational error, Torrey Canyon struck Pollard's Rock on Seven Stones reef between the Cornish mainland and the Isles of Scilly on 18 March 1967.

The tanker did not have a scheduled route and as such lacked a complement of full scale charts of the Scilly Islands. To navigate the region, the vessel used LORAN, but not the more accurate Decca Navigator.

Torre Canyon geographical position with the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)

It remains Britain’s biggest oil spill at up to 117,000 tonnes, or 1,231-times more than the amount leaked by a BP North Sea platform last year.
The ripples from the spill are still felt 50 years on.
An unknown quantity of the oil remains in a Guernsey quarry, where spill response teams carry out a training exercise each year.

 Much of the oil that washed up on Guernsey was pumped into an old quarry, fenced off to the public and used today to train disaster response teams.

Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian 

Today’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the environmental groups with millions of members are also partly a product of the incident.
So is the way that authorities react to spills, and the shipping industry’s modern failsafe measures.
At the time, the crisis ignited an incredible chain of responses.
The government, led by prime minister and Scilly Isles holidayer Harold Wilson, unleashed RAF bombers to sink the wreck and released thousands of tonnes of detergent that proved toxic to marine life.
“The cure was worse than the malady,” said Stephen J Hawkins, a scientist at the Plymouth-based Marine Biological Association, which studied the spill’s impact on wildlife and habitats.
“Today people are better prepared. Then, people didn’t know, they were making it up as they went along.”

Initially it was thought the ship could be salvaged, a prospect supported by its owners, the Bahama-based Barracuda Tanker Corporation.
Later, the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, said ministers considered towing it to to the mid-Atlantic and sinking it.
Eventually, they decided the best way of stopping the oil pollution was to bomb and sink the stricken vessel.
Ten days after the supertanker began leaking, on 28 March, Buccaneer bombers took off with the mission of sending the Torrey Canyon to the seabed.
“From the hill at the back of St Martin’s we had a grandstand view of these planes going over. Then there was a huge pall of horrible, black smoke,” said Perkins.

 The Royal Navy decided to bomb and sink the Torrey Canyon. 

Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

Only 23 of the 41 1,000lb bombs dropped in Operation Oil Buster actually hit the huge target. However, “the navy made an efficient job of it, providing a ‘spectacular’ not seen since the war,” wrote Guardian reporter, Dennis Barker, who passed away in 2015.

Perhaps most spectacular of all, the RAF Buccaneers were followed by Hawker Hunters and Sea Vixens, and napalm was dropped in an effort to burn off the oil.
The resulting “ring of fire” sent up a three-mile smoke plume that it was reported could be seen 100 miles away.
Finally, on 30 March, the ship began to sink.
The government also poured 10,000 tonnes of a BP-manufactured “detergent”, a crude first generation dispersant, into the sea and on the shore. In some cases, barrels of the stuff were literally rolled off cliffs.
“BP, whose oil it was, was selling detergent in industrial quantities which was getting poured over the beaches, killing off the microorganisms which would have broken down the oil,” said Tony Soper, now 88, who reported on the story for the Western Morning News.
Hawkins, who has just this week been taking samples at Porthleven in West Cornwall, found that areas where the detergents were not used, because of concerns over seals, recovered in two to three years, compared with the 13-14 years where the detergents were deployed.

“By the time the oil got to Guernsey, they didn’t treat things with dispersant. They learned from the lessons,” said Hawkins.
In total, hundreds of miles of coastline were affected by the oil spill, and about 15,000 seabirds are thought to have died. Soper said: “The tidal edge of the beaches in West Cornwall was simply covered by a thick carpet of black goo. It was a pretty fearsome smell.”
While the wildlife has recovered in the decades since, some of the disaster’s consequences are felt even now.
Some experts draw a direct line between the incident and the creation in 1970 of the government’s environment department, the first of its kind in the world.
Dr Rob Lambert, environmental historian at the University of Nottingham, said: “Torrey Canyon led inexorably in a way to the Department for the Environment. It was a recognition that the environment had risen up to the top of the political agenda.”

Dispersant sprayed into the harbour.

Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Lambert also credits the incident with sparking the first big rush of environmental volunteering. People travelled from Bristol and further afield in an attempt to clean birds, in sinks at hairdressers, at dedicated animal rescue centres and reportedly even in prisons.
“We take eco volunteering as normal now, but this was the first big example in Britain. The tragedy was that most of these birds were beyond help and they died,” said Lambert.
Torrey Canyon made household names of some environmentalists, including a Durham University botany and ecology lecturer called David Bellamy.

 

An RSPCA notice in Cornwall informs people where to take injured birds.

Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer 

The 84-year broadcaster said of the disaster: “Many lessons were learnt and are still being learnt. It was probably the first time that words like environment and conservation were voiced on the media, later to become so commonplace.”
He remembers coming to public notice after being interviewed on TV by John Craven.
Government and industry responses to oil spills are much better today, partly as a result of Torrey Canyon, according to Hawkins.
Oil spill contingency plans, something that did not exist in 1967, are in place around the coast.
On rocky coasts, spilled oil is considered best left alone, while in more vulnerable areas such as salt marshes, booms are deployed.
The dispersants deployed are much less toxic, and rarely used at the shore.
“The response is much more proportionate now,” said Hawkins.

 Soldiers clean up the oil slick on the beach of Perros-Guirec.

Photograph: -/AFP/Getty Images

The International Maritime Organization said that many of the measures to prevent a spill employed by today’s shipping industry, such as double hulls and duplicate navigation controls, can be traced back to the disaster of 1967.
Industry statistics show the number of shipping spills worldwide is down 90% since the 1970s; 99.9% of crude oil last year was delivered safely.
While Torrey Canyon’s physical impact has virtually disappeared, there is one place it lives on, in the English Channel.
Nineteen days after the tanker ran aground, the oil reached Guernsey’s beaches, sparking an emergency operation to scoop it up and send 3,000 tonnes of it, mixed with sand, to a granite quarry on the island.

 Onlookers watch the distant bombing of the stricken Torrey Canyon.

Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer 

Some of the oil was later recovered and burned for power in the 1980s, but most sat in the quarry’s waters, occasionally coating guillemots in oil.
Eventually, micro-organisms were deployed in 2008 to munch the oil, but after a large quantity of oil surged to the surface in 2009, more extreme measures were called for.
In total, 160,000 litres of contaminated water was removed by buckets – but an unknown quantity of the Torrey Canyon’s oil still remains below the surface.
“It’s just looking like a pond now,” said Steve Byrne, manager of the GSPCA animal shelter, which has had no reports of oiled birds since 2012.
“We had been called out for 45 years to help them, so it’s great news.”

Links :

• The Guardian : From the archive: the Torrey Canyon oil spill disaster of 1967 / Torrey Canyon oil spill 1967 - in pictures
• Sud Ouest : 50 years of oil spills in pictures
• British Pathé : Torrey Canyon Disaster (1967)
• BBC : Torrey Canyon oil spill: The day the sea turned black / Torrey Canyon seabed returns to normal after oil spill (2011)
• The Independant : Torrey Canyon: How marine life is returning to the Cornish coast 50 years after one of world’s worst oil spills
• Plymouth Herald : Is Britain ready for another Torrey Canyon oil disaster? 

Finisterra

Nothing ends beyond land.
We are tied to the ocean.

And when we go back to the sea,

whether it is to sail or to watch, we are going back from whence we came.

Let's not take this place for granted!

Book : Sea Charts of the British Isles

  Sea Charts of the British Isles, a 2005 book that is getting a paperback edition in next April.

Traveling along the British coastline, Sea Charts of the British Isles showcases a beautiful collection of charts containing a wealth of information about Britain's maritime history and the story of charting and surveying itself.

A 1482 recreation of a map from Ptolemy's Geography (2nd century)

showing the "Oceanus Germanicus", Great Britain & Ireland

The great names in British chart-making are all included, such as Captain Greenvile Collins, Professor Murdoch Mackenzie and his nephew of the same name, Graeme Spence, and William Bligh, who between them created the first structured attempts to survey and chart particular areas of the coast of mainland Britain as well as the more remote islands.

River Thames by Captn Collins

 Pland of the bay and harbour of Conway by Lewis Morris, 1748

Examples include several from Collins' “Great Britain's Coastal Pilot,” such as charts of Edinburgh and the Forth, the Orkney Islands, the coast of Ireland and the River Thames; the Chart of the Coast of Wales in St George's Channel and that of Milford Haven by Lewis Morris; The River Clyde and Glasgow by John Watt; and the Observation by Trinity House Pilots and Surveyors of the Downs covering the coast of Kent and the Goodwin Sands, as well as charts by other well-known European chart-makers, such as the magnificent example of the Coast of England from Dover to the Isle of Wight showing the Cinque Ports by Lucas Janszoon Wagenaer that dates from 1583.

 Lewis Morris' coastal charts of Wales.

In 1748 Admiralty encouraged the publication of Morris private survey of the Welsh coast and individual harbour plans.

John Blake, the author has researched maritime archives including the Admiralty Library, the National Maritime Museum, the Pepys Library, the UK Hydrographic Office, and the National Archives to reveal their unseen nautical records and portray the development of the sea chart.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : The Sea Chart by John Blake

UK at risk from ships covertly sailing into Europe after 'suspicious stops' near terror strongholds, say security analysts

Security analysts find vessels could be turning off tracking systems to evade authorities

From The Independant by Lizzie Dearden

Ships from conflict zones and terrorist strongholds are covertly sailing into European waters on suspected smuggling missions while attempting to evade detection, security analysts have warned.
Research by the Windward maritime data company found that in the first two months of 2017, 50 vessels with invalid registration numbers entered the UK, and 245 more with “suspicious” gaps in tracking data.

Another 40 ships sailed into Europe from near Isis-controlled territory in Libya after unexplained black-outs on their automatic identification systems (AIS) during January and February.
Ami Daniel, the firm’s CEO and cofounder, warned that the cases found so far are just a small fraction of covert voyages in Europe.

A Cyprus-flagged cargo ship made several 'suspicious stops' while tracking data disappeared off the coast of Algeria before journeying to the Scottish island of Islay
(image : Windward)

“There is a void,” he told The Independent. “No one is looking at what’s coming at sea – everyone is looking at planes, everyone is looking at land borders but no one is looking at shipping.
“It’s frightening but it’s the reality.”
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) requires all ships to be assigned a unique reference number that can be combined with AIS data to avoid collisions and monitor movements, course and speed.
But Windward found numerous cases where fake IMO numbers were being assigned to large cargo vessels, as well as blips in tracking that appeared to lengthy to be accidental.
Mr Daniel said AIS equipment, which communicates with satellites, is mandatory for all large international ships and passenger vessels.
“These are safety transmissions so definition you would not turn that off,” he added.
“People who turn off transitions are doing a trade-off in their minds.”
Analysts believe such a trade would most likely be made for illicit reasons to evade authorities, possibly while carrying illegal cargo such as weapons, drugs or people.

A Tel Aviv startup company is distinguishing itself in Israel and with clients on four continents by its ability to clear away the clutter on loosely regulated, often fraudulent high seas.
Using what it calls activity-based intelligence, Windward, a five-year-old maritime data and analytics firm here, probes beyond the ship-tracking services available on today’s market to validate identities of ocean-going vessels.
It compares their patterns of behavior and past associations with other ships — even where they loaded or didn’t load in specific ports of call. 
(image : Windward)

One of the vessels tracked was a Cyprus-flagged cargo ship owned by a Russian company, which broke from its normal pattern of voyages between Northern Europe and West Africa last month.
It diverted via the Mediterranean Sea to make its first port visit in Ukraine in December, before sailing back towards Gibraltar and engaging in “12 days of suspicious drifting” where the AIS repeatedly stopped transmitting.

 Cyprus-flagged cargo reefer visited Ukraine before entering the Mediterranean.

As it sailed towards Gibraltar it drifted for 12 days off the Algerian and Moroccan coasts, shutting down its AIS multiple times, on one occasion for 28 hours

(image : Windward)

The ship went dark near the port of Oran in Algeria, where gangs are active trafficking migrants, narcotics and illegal arms, and al-Qaeda is waging an Islamist insurgency.
On 9 January, it set sail for the UK and arrived in Scotland five days later, performing a “suspicious stop” off the coast of Islay for 11 hours, when analysts said illicit cargo may have been loaded on to smaller boats.

Ship Detection and Tracking
Localisation of vessels and small-sized boats with Pleiades satellite.

“The UK’s coastline is vulnerable,” a report by Windward found.
“The maritime domain is vast and laws are difficult to enforce.
“Ships with criminal or terror-related intentions can easily conceal their cargo – arms, drugs or people.
 Although ships arriving in EU ports have to declare their last calling point, researchers say the measure does not take account of behaviour at sea including diversions and offshore transfers.
As well as fake registration numbers and disappearing location transmissions, more than half of all vessels entering the UK were using “flags of convenience” – linked to tax avoidance, regulation dodging and crime – as well as hundreds had ship-to-ship meetings just outside territorial waters.

Libya to Greece: A large bulk carrier travelled from Libya to southern Crete — a deviation of its normal route.

It stopped off at the tiny resort of Kokkinos, raising fears of a people smuggling operation

(image : Windward)

There is particular concern over ships leaving conflict zones including Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia, which have been tracked carrying out “suspicious movements” off the coast of Greece and other European nations.

Identification of the hijacked MV Sirius Star anchored at the Somali port of Harardhere
(image : TerraSAR X)

Many lose transmission while anchoring around a mile offshore – far from port but close enough to land for smaller vessels to transfer goods.
“You might have ship come out of Libya, conduct a ship-to-ship transfer near Malta, change registration numbers and someone has done business with Isis,” Mr Daniel said.
Smuggling gangs based in the war-torn country packed disused cargo ships and fishing vessels with hundreds of refugees at the start of the Mediterranean crisis, sailing them into open water before calling for aid and abandoning what became known as “ghost ships”.

 By mid-January the reefer was off the coast of Islay,

spending 11 hours at a spot where there are no ports

(image : Windward)

Unseaworthy dinghies are now dominantly used but there have been reports of groups using commercial vessels to transport migrants from port to port before launching them towards Europe.
Mr Daniel, a former officer in the Israeli navy, said the world of shipping presented an easier method of expansion for terrorist groups and criminal organizations than more tightly regulated airports and land borders.

 Libya to Greece.

An Italian-flagged oil tanker sailed north fromLibya towards Greece.

En route it made two unusual stops — one for seven hours near Crete, and the second for 15 hours close to the mainland

(image : Windward)

“They can transport people, weapons, drugs, they can finance wars,” he added.
“It’s still the Wild West in these seas.”
European crime agency Europol said it was monitoring people smuggling as part of the refugee crisis but that the primary responsibility for maritime security lay with member states.

 Example of vessels detected with RADARSAT-2 outside the coast of Somalia and correlated with AIS data.
Green circles indicate positions of vessel reported with Satellite AIS.

Red circles indicate positions of non-reporting vessel, only detected in the satellite image (RADARSAT-2 SCANSAR Narrow Mode © MacDonald, Dettwiler & Associates Ltd., 2009)

(image : Kongsberg)

A Home Office spokesperson said: “Border Force monitors vessels sailing off our coastline for suspicious behaviour, including the disruption of AIS.
“The National Maritime Information Centre brings together officers from Border Force, the National Crime Agency, police, Royal Navy, coastguard and others to share intelligence, detect and respond to a range of threats.
“This approach is working. In 2015, a vessel carrying more than three tonnes of cocaine was detected despite turning off its AIS system.”

Links :

• The Times : All At Sea, Suspicious shipping activity must be investigated forcefully / Security fears over cargo ships ‘going dark’ near terror zones
• FT : Europe’s ports vulnerable as ships sail without oversight
• GeoGarage blog :  Google's global fishing watch is using 'manipulated data' / Rising fraud in the high seas / Combatting maritime cyber security threats / Concern over 'high seas security loophole' / Loose blips sink ships: leaky communications threaten marine vessels / Boom in satellite ship tracking
• Windward : An anlaysis of the magnitude and implications of growing data manipulation at sea
• Pulse : Cyber Security and Maritime Industry : Securing the vessels, ports and sea / Problems encountered with AIS for lawyers and insurers
• Trend Micro : Vulnerabilities Discovered in Global Vessel Tracking Systems
• EC : Performance of AIS sensors in space 
• SpaceNews : MDA to acquire DigitalGlobe

Boaty McBoatface submarine set for first voyage

'Boaty McBoatface' to leave port.

The yellow submarine dubbed "Boaty McBoatface" is set to leave for Antarctica this week on its first science expedition.

Prof Russell Wynn explains the workings of Boaty McBoatface

 From BBC by Jonathan Amos

The yellow submarine named Boaty McBoatface is set to leave for Antarctica this week on its first science expedition.

The robot is going to map the movement of deep waters that play a critical role in regulating Earth's climate.
Boaty carries the name that a public poll had suggested be given to the UK's future £200m polar research vessel.
The government felt this would be inappropriate and directed the humorous moniker go on a submersible instead.
But what many people may not realise is that there is actually more than one Boaty.
The name covers a trio of vehicles in the new Autosub Long Range class of underwater robots developed at Southampton's National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
These machines can all be configured slightly differently depending on the science tasks they are given.

The one that will initiate the "adventures of Boaty" will head out of Punta Arenas, Chile, on Friday aboard Britain's current polar ship, the RRS James Clark Ross.
The JCR will drop the sub into a narrow, jagged, 3,500m-deep gap in an underwater ridge that extends northeast of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Referred to as the Orkney Passage, this is the gateway into the Atlantic for much of the "bottom-water" that is created as sea-ice grows on the margins of the White Continent.
Frozen floes will cool and densify the water immediately below them, and this then generates a current that slides into the abyss to eventually move northwards.
And in traversing the Orkney Passage, the bottom-water can feed the "great ocean conveyor" - the relentless system of deep circulation that helps redistribute all the heat energy that has built up in the climate system.
Boaty's mission will be to survey conditions in the passage.
Scientific moorings anchored in the area already gather some data, but the robot's mobility and autonomy means it can now build a full, three-dimensional picture of what's happening many hundred of metres below the surface.

 The JCR will eventually be replaced by the RRS Sir David Attenborough 

Scientists have good evidence that the bottom-water is warming.
Quite why is not clear but it could have major implications, says Prof Mike Meredith from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
"One of these is sea-level rise because if you make water warmer obviously it expands and that pushes the sea level up," he told BBC News.
"But it also has relevance for benthic ecosystems. So, the animals that live on the seabed can typically cope well with low temperatures but not all of them can cope with changes in temperatures. The fact that this water has been getting warmer may have significant consequences for these animals."

Bottom-water is generated at the margin of the continent and then spills north into the Atlantic

The recorded warming could be the result of a change in the way the deep current is moving through the passage.
If there is greater turbulence as the bottom-water flows over the jagged terrain, it might be mixing more warm water downwards.
Boaty will have a probe on its nose to assess this.
"There are 'rapids' and 'waterfalls' that are occurring within the channels and valleys that surround underwater mountains in the passage," explained Dr Eleanor Frajka-Williams from Southampton University.
"Boaty is going to make measurements within these 'streams' and 'rivers' of the smallest-scale motions to try to understand how that water is being changed as it leaves the formation regions around Antarctica and then spreads out over the world's oceans."

 The Autosub LR class of vehicles is beginning full science operations after successful sea trials

And while this particular robot is hard at work in the Southern Ocean, its two siblings back in Southampton are being prepared for their own expeditions.
Scientists are queuing up to use them, and to exploit their ability to autonomously patrol the oceans for weeks, even months, on end.
"Having three Boaty vehicles in the fleet means we can cover a much wider range of environments and geographic locations than we could with just one," said NOC's Prof Russell Wynn.
"So, one vehicle might be going out to Antarctica and surveying around and under the ice; another might be going to the deepest parts of the ocean, down to 6km; and another might be doing something more applied in, for example, the North Sea.
"We're getting lots of proposals and it's great that we can meet that demand," he told BBC News.
The Dynamics of the Orkney Passage Outflow (DynOPO) expedition is a collaboration between BAS, the University of Southampton and NOC.

Links :

• New York Times : Boaty McBoatface, From Internet Joke to Polar Explorer  
• The Guardian : Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission
• The Independant : Boaty McBoatface to begin first Antarctic mission since naming competition
• Unmanned Systems technology : National Oceanography Centre AUV Prepares for First Antarctic Mission