Saturday, April 26th, 2008. Torrey Canyon.
In the morning of March 18th, 1967, the “Torrey Canyon”, the first of the supertankers capable of carrying a cargo of 120,000 tons of crude oil, hit Pollard’s Rock in the Seven Stones reef, cruising at a speed of 17 knots, and ripping open 6 tanks.
Because of its length of 974.4 feet, the “Torrey Canyon” had not passed through the Suez Canal. Instead, the ship took a route from Mina al-Ahmadi, Kuwait, around Africa by way of the Cape of Good Hope. On March 14, as it passed between Tenerife and Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, Captain Pastrengo Rugiati, was informed by the ship’s agent that it was imperative that he arrived at his destination in Milford Haven, Wales, by high tide at 2300 on March 18th, least a week pass by before the tide would be again high enough for the tanker to enter the harbour.
Captain Rugiati set in the autopilot a course from the Canaries that should have taken the “Torrey Canyon” five miles to the west of the Isles of Scilly. At noon on March 17th, he checked his position and found that he was on course. When he went to bed that night, he left instructions to wake him at 0600, expecting to have the Scillies on radar, somewhere off the starboard bow by that time.
Instead, the next morning the Scillies appeared off the port bow. During the night, strong currents had pushed the “Torrey Canyon” to the north and east, and while the captain slept, the chief officer had altered the course from 18° to 12°.
When he was awakened at 06300, Rugiati decided not to turn around the Isles of Scilly to avoid adding 40 miles to his journey time, and with only a small scale chart of the area, he chose to cross the 7 miles wide gap between the Scillies and the Seven Stones.
Rugiati ordered a return to his original course of 18°. By now, the course of the tanker had the reef of the Seven Stones in its path, and high tide would obscure the reef from sight. The captain was aware of the problem and planned to make adjustments to take the ship through the deep channel between the Scillies and the Seven Stones.
At the sight of fishing ships in the channel, the captain steered well clear of the nets, making two slight corrections of 3° and 2°, and setting a new course of 13°, that moved the ship starboard to the right of channel and closer to the reef, to avoid the nets.
At 0840, with the captain, a junior officer in his first trip, and the helmsman in the bridge, the plotting error is discovered. A position is re-plotted immediately, only to learn that the vessel is only 2.8 miles from the edge of the reef.
With the helmsman at the wheel, Rugiati plotted again a fix, switched off the autopilot and brought hurriedly the ship to 0°, turning the autopilot back on. By then, the officer on watch could clearly see that the “Torrey Canyon” was already among the slightly submerged rocks of Seven Stones. He noted that it was 0848. Informed of the problem, Rugiati, still dizzy from only three hours of sleep, ordered a hard swing to port changing the course to 340°. The tanker did not move.
Rugiati rushed into the chartroom at the back of the bridge to inspect the chart. The helmsman shouted that he could not hear the clicks with which the autopilot marks every degree turned, but his captain failed to hear him.
Then Rugiati himself realized that he did not hear the autopilot clicks. He decided that the fuses might have been blown as it had happened before, opening the fuse box and checking them to find them in working order. He deducted that the oil pumps that move the rudder must be at fault, and rang the engine room asking the chief engineer to check the pumps, dialling by mistake a number that go him to the galley where the cook informed him that his breakfast was ready.
Captain Rugiati glanced down at the wheel: The autopilot control lever had been inadvertently knocked down and rested at the mark of Disengage between the positions Manual and Autopilot. He moved the level to manual and changed course to avoid the disaster. The “Torrey Canyon” started turning only to hit Pollard’s Rock at full speed.
An order of full astern was obeyed but had no effect. The bottom was being torn out of the tanker.
After helicopters and lifeboats rescued the crew, Pastrengo Rugiati, and three men stayed on board. A distress call brought a Dutch tug, Utrecht, but rough seas made it impossible for the tug to pull alongside. Plans were made to pull the stranded tanker off at the next high tide. In preparation, the crew began pumping cargo overboard to lighten the ship. Very quickly, a six-mile-long slick of crude oil developed.
After nightfall there was an attempt to move the ship. It failed and, by dawn, the ship had a list of 8° to starboard. In rough seas with 20-foot swells, the crew began to abandon ship. Rugiati was the last to abandon the deck.
At the next high tide the following day, there was a second attempt to pull the tanker from the rocks. By this time, vapors were building up within the ship. At noon on March 19, there was a terrific explosion. Five men left onboard were injured and captain H.B. Stal, a salvage expert airlifted from Amsterdam, and a member of the crew of the tug “Praia da Adraga”, were blown to the sea.
Sailors F.M van Rixel and A.B. van Wijk, both of the tug “Titan”, jumped from their boat and dived into the oil-covered waters, rescuign Captain Hal, who died on board the “Titan” as she entered the harbour of Newlyn near Penzance.
Salvage companies still wanted to tow the listing ship away but were in a quandary about where to take it. Great Britain, fearful of widespread pollution, refused entry at any port, and decided to bombed the shipwreck.
The bombing raids began when eight Royal Naval Buccaneers that took off from Lossiemouth in Scotland.
In all, the Raf and the Royal Navy dropped 62,000lbs of bombs, 5,200 gallons of petrol, 11 rockets and large quantities of napalm onto the ship.
Despite direct hits, and the inferno of towering flames and smoke created as the oil began to burn, the tanker refused to sink.
The bombing mission was called off when particularly high spring tides put out the flames.
The efforts of the salvage ships could not move “Torrey Canyon” a bit. Pollard’s Rock had penetrated deep into the hull and a final attempt failed. Within a week of the accident, oil began coming ashore at Cornwall.
The disaster led to changes in shipping international regulations. The first Civil Liability Convention (Clc/69) and the International Convention Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Oil Pollution Casualties (Intervention 1969), that for the first time since the Anti-Piracy Conventions affirmed the right of a coastal state to take measures on the high seas to prevent, mitigate or eliminate danger to its coastline from pollution by oil following upon a maritime casualty.
[Ignacio Wenley Palacios]
in Shipping Law
|
5 Comments
Email Article to Friend
Reader Comments (5)
How fortunate were the Fortunate Isles,the oil came within a smidgen of St Martins before the wind and tide took it clear of the islands. The pleasure boats nontheless had tide lines of oil on their hulls.
The stench of oil in Penzance was awful and as we flew back to the mainland in the helicopter the extent of the pollution brought a deathly hush to the passengers, who could only look on in disbelief. "The government spent far too long arguing about what to do!" seemed to be the consensus of local opinion.
40 years on, I still ask the question:" What happened to the oil that was scraped from the rocks and beaches of Cornwall and elsewhere? Where was it dumped, and will Torrey Canyon oil return to haunt us when it begins to seep from some unsuspecting landfill site?"
Well done.