An unnatural disaster

It was the environmental disaster that had been dreaded ever since tankers began carrying thousands of tons of oil around our oceans. Forty years ago, in 1967, Guernsey's west coast hummed with the pungent smell of oil from the stricken Torrey Canyon. Chris Morvan takes us through the unfolding of a drama that could be repeated at any time SHIPWRECKS off Guernsey used to be all too common, particularly off the treacherous west coast before the shipping lanes were established in the 1970s. Until that time, ships could pass as close to our coastline as they wanted - and many pushed their luck too far.

But it was an incident many miles away, off the Isles of Scilly, that caused Guernsey's worst environmental disaster.

In February 1967 the Torrey Canyon, the first of the big supertankers, with a capacity of 120,000 tons of crude oil, had left Kuwait with a full cargo, reaching the Canary Islands on 14 March and then heading for Milford Haven, on the coast of Pembrokeshire, south Wales.

Four days later, through a navigational error, it struck the Seven Stones reef between the Scillies and Land's End. Attempts were made to float the ship off the rocks, but these were unsuccessful and a member of the Dutch salvage team died in the process. After several days the crippled giant broke apart and alarm gripped every coastal community from Wales to France.

It was the first oil spill on such a scale and no one was quite sure how to deal with it. Lightweight foam booms were used to try to contain the oil, but the power of the sea soon overwhelmed them.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his cabinet held a meeting at RAF Culdrose, Cornwall, to decide how to deal with the situation.

The Fleet Air Arm bombed the wreck in an attempt to sink it and burn off the oil and the RAF assisted in the dropping of napalm and petrol to try to set fire to the slick, but the damage was done and Guernsey, like all the other communities, just had to wait and hope.

In the last week of March the States decided to prepare by fitting out three local trawlers, the Mourne Lass, Hopeful Venture and Stormdrift, as detergent-spraying vessels, that having been identified as the best way to break up the slick. The Royal Navy brought supplies of detergent and trials were carried out in the Little Russel with small patches of oil placed deliberately.

On 28 March harbour master Captain John Allez announced that there was a slick 33 miles by 10 miles located about 50 miles from the island. Two days later this was down to 40 miles.

In St Peter Port Harbour a 600ft boom was being constructed, cobbled together from hessian and fishing nets confiscated from French boats found operating illegally in local waters.

Three Royal Navy minesweepers were based here, travelling daily to attack the slick.

Meanwhile the first oiled seabirds were being washed up on our coast and the survivors cleaned up at the Animal Shelter.

On 1 April the Evening Press reported that the Hopeful Venture had tested the spraying of detergent in Petit Port.

The navy began making encouraging noises. The captain of one of the minesweepers, HMS Highburton, said the efforts to break up the slick had been successful and the situation looked much better.

Local fishermen were unimpressed, pointing out that as long as it remained the other side of the Hurd Deep, it would be OK, but once past that point it would enter our tidal systems and pollution of our coasts would be inevitable.In Alderney a boom was being constructed of bales of hay and windbreaks used to protect crops.

One theory was that if oil did wash up on our beaches, it should be left for a couple of days to solidify and could then be picked up.

The British Army assembled 400 troops at Tidworth, Wiltshire, to help if necessary and an officer came to Guernsey to set up an HQ and prepare to get the soldiers over here as soon as possible if the oil struck.

Alderney now had supplies of detergent to add to its Heath Robinson defences.

On 4 April, just as a spraying exercise was being carried out at Soldiers' Bay, a naval spokesman announced that the Channel Islands were out of danger.

A similar exercise took place at Vazon as the number of oiled seabirds began to increase, the Animal Shelter treating guillemots, gulls and razorbills.

Islanders got on with their lives, with entertainment featuring Born Free and the film of England's recent World Cup victory, Goal!, showing at the Gaumont Cinema.

Then on 6 April the Evening Press carried a report headed 'Oil: the navy ends its task'. However, just before printing, a Stop Press article was rushed onto the same page: 'Oil reaches west coast beaches.'

Perelle and Grand Havre were among the first victims and 50 men from the Public Works Department were out spraying. Its manager at the time was Bill Druce: the responsibility for a land-based response fell to him.

Now 85 and long retired, Mr Druce was well known throughout the island as a footballer, a wing half with North and Rangers. While he could devote only part of his time to the oil operation, having his normal job to do as well, he assigned six sewage lorries to the task, overseen by the PWD's building section superintendent, Bill Quesnel.

The use of detergent in itself led to more problems, with fishermen worried that it could do more damage to fish stocks than the oil would.

On a completely different note, Reg Blanchford, area commissioner of the St John Ambulance Brigade, was concerned for the welfare of the people doing the spraying. Were they dressed properly? he wanted to know, as the first casualty arrived at the Ambulance Station suffering from a skin rash caused by the oil, the detergent or both.

The men were wearing overalls with rubber boots, gloves and protective goggles, but quickly became drenched in the oil and chemicals.

The States decided to defer a fully active response until it became clear if this was the extent of the problem, or if it was going to get worse. Around 34,000 gallons of detergent were at their disposal, still owned by the navy and to be charged at 10 shillings (50p) a gallon.

On the first afternoon of spraying #500-worth was used - the price of a small family car. Panic measures elsewhere had proved disastrous, a States spokesman said, and they were going to take a measured approach.

One man who had decided that enough was enough was Lt Col Patrick Wootton, of Lihou, who declared his intention of suing the Torrey Canyon's owners.

On Monday 10 April he asked the public to keep away from the island and, while he was giving this information to an Evening Press reporter, he was on his way to the Venus Pool to shoot a guillemot that was trapped in oil.

The fishermen were now questioning Guernsey's readiness, pointing out that while three local trawlers had been fitted with spraying equipment, in Jersey the figure was 10 times that number.

Ormers were deemed to be safe because they live just below the low-water mark and there were no spring tides in the near future, so the oil was passing safely overhead.

Marine biologists and other scientists throughout the UK and in France were keeping a close eye on the situation and everyone was hoping the incident would not be catastrophic for the environment.

Sewage lorries were now being used to suck up the oil and Guernsey's west coast was seeing an endless stream of them heading north to empty their cargo in a quarry at Chouet, then returning for another load. Some nights they worked until 4am, with the statement: 'No high tide is being missed, be it noon or midnight.'

The Public Works Department had devised an unlikely but ingenious way of skimming the oil from the surface and into the hoses of the sewage lorries, as Mr Druce explained. 'We attached a dustpan to the hose. It was so successful that when there was an oil spill in South Africa later, they copied our method.'

Temporary 800-gallon storage tanks were installed at Fort Saumarez to make the disposal effort easier.By Saturday 13 April, 329,600 gallons of oil had been removed from the beaches in this way, along with thousands of tons of polluted beach material - stones, seaweed etc.

A new concern then emerged: the prevailing north-easterly wind was keeping the oil in place, but a change to south-westerly could sweep it out of the affected bays and into others which had so far escaped it.

On Monday 17 April workers at the worst-affected parts noticed something that had been missing since the oil appeared: ripples on the sea, indicating that there was water at the surface rather than the smooth, heavy, unruffled look that spelled pollution. As the Evening Press put it, this 'indicated that the battle was being won, however slowly'.

Mechanical shovels were still scooping up what they could and loading it onto lorries. Grandes Rocques had improved noticeably and Cobo had been treated quite successfully, but there was a great deal of work to be done.

At Fort Doyle, for instance, there were still heavy deposits in a gully.

At Perelle, fishermen were badly impeded by the oil. They might be able to bring up shellfish in their pots in unpolluted areas, but the storepots were closer in, often under a blanket of oil.

In the tiny headland bay called La Rocque was what Mr Druce described as 'a lagoon' of oil. 'Clearing that was easy,' he said. 'We built a runway into it, using quarry rubble, and just pumped it out.'

The small amount that came ashore at Pembroke Bay was dealt with quickly, too.

'We sprayed it with detergent and because there was so little, it just turned to foam and dispersed in the sea.'

Booms were being used to try to manage the slicks and seaweed itself was being used as a natural sponge, absorbing oil and making it easier to scoop up. 'We would cut clean seaweed and spread it over the sand,' Mr Druce said.

A mood of optimism began to pervade the island, but not for long.

On Wednesday 19 April, passengers and crew on an inbound aeroplane spotted a new slick off Pleinmont.

The following day an RAF Shackleton aircraft reported that a slick had appeared in the Little Russel.

Small amounts had already been washed up in Herm, but were dealt with as they occurred. Sark, too, had suffered small amounts but no more than that.

At Le Crocq, the headland topped by Fort Richmond, a dam was built of rubble to keep the oil out of Vazon.

On Tuesday 25 April the headline was, 'Back of oil menace broken', but it was being taken with a pinch of salt. We'd heard it before and as if to demonstrate, high tides and strong winds threw oil along with seawater over the wall at Perelle and into gardens where flying salty debris is a fact of life.

Most people's lives went on as normal.

St Martin's beat Jersey champions Georgetown in the inter-island club football championship, the Upton.

Spring was giving way to early summer and an Evening Press reporter took his family for the year's first trip to the beach at Les Amarreurs. Although this wasn't one of the badly affected parts, his children, scrambling across the rocks and exploring, managed to come back covered in oil.

Lt Col Wootton's attempts to get compensation for the damage caused to Lihou produced a heartening response from BP.

In an unusually creative letter, the company accepted no responsibility, pointing out that it had lost its entire cargo of oil, worth $600,000, and likening it to an old lady who just happens to be a passenger in a taxi that knocks down a pedestrian.

BP did, however, offer to help with the clean-up operation.

After that, at least as regards Evening Press reports, the trail goes cold and life returned to normal. The sewage lorries were cleaned out with detergent and the resulting foamy liquid flushed out onto rocks still covered in oil, thereby helping to break that down too.

It was an appropriately messy end to a damage limitation exercise that had seen Guernsey mobilised to protect itself in unprecedented circumstances.

* That may have been the last of the Torrey Canyon oil, but to add insult to injury, two incidents of deliberate pollution were observed by air travellers, as unscrupulous tanker captains, perhaps taking advantage of the metaphorical smokescreen that the oil slicks had created, cleared their tanks off our coast.

* While there is still a certain amount of oil in the quarry at Chouet, the outgoing chief executive of the Public Services Department, Richard Kirkpatrick, said that most of it had been removed over the years by 'entrepreneurs with schemes for recycling it'.