Episode Details

On March 18, 1967 the supertanker Torrey Canyon, bound from Kuwait to Milford Haven, slammed into Pollard's Rock on the Seven Stones Reef off Cornwall. Built in the U.S. in 1959 and cut in half in Japan to double its capacity to 120,000 tons without bigger engines or rudder, it was owned by a Union Oil subsidiary, chartered by BP, and flagged in Liberia. Racing to make high tide without full charts of the Scilly Isles, the crew could not turn in time because the steering selector sat in an unmarked maintenance mode that disconnected the wheel from the rudder. Salvage failed, and a member of the Dutch salvage team was killed.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson approved bombing the wreck: jets dropped 161 thousand pound bombs, kerosene, and napalm, but a quarter of the first 42 bombs missed and tides snuffed the fires. Some 10,000 tons of toxic solvent emulsifiers, sold to the public as detergents, were sprayed and even bulldozed into beaches like Sennen Cove. About 25 to 36 million gallons of oil fouled 120 miles of Cornwall and 50 miles of France and killed around 15,000 seabirds. Old maritime law capped liability at the ship's surviving value, one $50 lifeboat, so Britain arrested the sister ship Lake Palourde in Singapore to force the owners to settle.

• Lawyer Anthony O'Connor boarded the Lake Palourde posing as a whiskey salesman and nailed the writ to the mast.
• The disaster led to the 1969 Civil Liability Convention and the 1973 MARPOL treaty.
• Royal Navy steering overrides are still known as the Torrey Canyon switch.
• Studies of the survivors improved understanding of immersion hypothermia and rescue winching.
• Oily sludge dumped in a quarry on Guernsey's Chouet headland remains there today.