The Amoco Cadiz Runs Aground

Date March 16, 1978

The oil tanker Amoco Cadiz lost its steering and ran aground off Portsall, France, spilling its entire cargo of 69 million gallons of crude oil into the sea.

Locale Portsall, France

Key Figures

• Pasquale Bardari (fl. late twentieth century), captain of the tanker Amoco Cadiz
• Lesley Maynard (fl. late twentieth century), British marine safety expert who advised and assisted Captain Bardari during the crisis
• Salvatore Melito (fl. late twentieth century), chief engineer of the Amoco Cadiz who was responsible for the engine and the steering machinery
• Hartmut Weinert (fl. late twentieth century), captain of the seagoing salvage tug Pacific

Summary of Event

On the morning of March 16, 1978, the tanker Amoco Cadiz, carrying a load of 220,000 tons of crude oil, approached the western entrance of the English Channel. The Amoco Cadiz had loaded crude in the Persian Gulf and had sailed around the southern tip of Africa. It was scheduled to transfer some of the crude oil to a smaller tanker in the sheltered waters of England’s Lyme Bay and then proceed to the famous Europoort near Rotterdam, Holland.

Ships are measured in either long tons or metric tons. These units are nearly the same: A long ton is equivalent to 2,240 pounds, and a metric ton is equal to 1,000 kilograms, or 2,200 pounds. One U.S. gallon of crude oil weighs slightly more than 7 pounds, so there are about 310 gallons of crude to the ton. Oil is often measured in barrels; 1 barrel is equivalent to 42 gallons.

The Amoco Cadiz measured 334 meters in length and 51 meters in width. Stood on end, it would have been the height of the sixth-tallest building in the world. Steering was accomplished by a hydraulic system that turned a rudder nearly 13 meters tall and more than 8 meters wide. The rudder alone weighed nearly 160 tons. The Amoco Cadiz had been built in a shipyard in Spain. The ship was registered in Liberia and was officially owned by Amoco Transport Company. The real owner was Standard Oil of Indiana, whose offices are in Chicago, Illinois. At the time of the accident, the vessel was chartered to Shell Oil, and Shell owned the crude oil in the cargo tanks. This type of arrangement is not at all unusual in the global oil business.

At 9:45 a.m. local time, as the tanker passed about eight miles north of the small island of Ushant, the helmsman suddenly found that he could not control the Amoco Cadiz. Its bow swung counterclockwise from northeast, the direction it was supposed to go, to north. Continuing to swing, the bow pointed west and finally south. During this time, the engine was stopped, and the ship came to rest with its bow pointing toward the French coast. Weather conditions were terrible. The wind was blowing from the southwest at thirty to forty knots and increasing. Waves were running six to eight meters high with occasional waves as high as twenty meters. Huge as the ship was, the waves had been pushing the Amoco Cadiz around, and the man at the wheel had been fighting to keep the ship on course; at 9:45 a.m. he lost that battle.

Captain Pasquale Bardari immediately called the engine room and directed the engineer on watch to notify the chief engineer, Salvatore Melito, that the steering had failed. An alarm was sounded, and Melito and the other engineering officers ran to the engine control room to see what was wrong. Upon being told of the steering failure, they hurried to the steering machinery room located astern of the engine room itself. They found hydraulic oil everywhere and more oil spouting from a break in the piping system.

Meanwhile, on the bridge, where the ship’s navigation is controlled, Captain Bardari sent out a message warning other ships of his problem. There are three levels of emergency in Morse code messages. Captain Bardari chose the least serious of these—a message beginning with TTT. More serious is a message beginning with XXX. Most serious is a message beginning with the well-known SOS.

At 11:20 a.m., chief engineer Melito advised the captain that the steering machinery was not reparable by ship’s personnel. Captain Bardari promptly sent a radio message requesting the assistance of a seagoing tug. The Pacific, a German tug of 10,000 horsepower, received the request and immediately proceeded to the scene. By 1:30 p.m., the Pacific had arrived and hooked up its towing apparatus to the Amoco Cadiz. This apparatus included seven meters of heavy steel chain to ride in the Panama fairlead, a large iron ring at the edge of the tanker’s deck. A rope or wire cable rubbing against this fairlead would fray and break, but the chain was expected to endure.

While the towing apparatus was being connected, Captain Bardari and Lesley Maynard were negotiating with Captain Hartmut Weinert, the master of the Pacific. Under these circumstances, towing is usually performed under a contract called Lloyds Open Form. This agreement states that payment for towing services will be determined later by an impartial arbitrator in London. Arbitrators normally award a much larger fee to the tug’s owner than he would get for a normal towing job over the same distance. The purpose of Lloyds Open Form is to avoid delay for negotiation in emergencies such as this.

Captain Bardari hoped to negotiate a normal towing contract rather than a Lloyds Open Form, but Captain Weinert properly insisted on the latter. It does not appear that this disagreement had any effect on the outcome. The towing apparatus was connected, and the Pacific began its attempt to tow the Amoco Cadiz while negotiations proceeded on the radio.

Once the apparatus was in place, the Pacific attempted to pull the bow of the Amoco Cadiz around to the west, into the wind and away from the French coast. The huge size of the Amoco Cadiz and the very bad weather were obstacles the Pacific could not overcome, however. The bow of the big tanker swung perhaps thirty degrees toward the west but would turn no farther. The Pacific continued to pull, and at 4:16 p.m. the chain broke where it passed through the Panama fairlead.

In the nearly seven hours since the steering failure, the Amoco Cadiz had drifted less than five miles, mostly eastward. This left it about eight miles from the rocks where it eventually went aground. It took nearly four hours for the tug to rig a new towing apparatus and hook up to the tanker’s stern. Meanwhile, the big ship was drifting perilously close to the rocks. The Pacific began pulling again before 9:00 p.m., but to no avail. At 9:04, the Amoco Cadiz ran aground near the French village of Portsall.

Significance

The sea is particularly fruitful in the area around Portsall. Almost 40 percent of France’s seafood comes from the area called Brittany, where Portsall is located. Thousands of fishermen work out of Brittany’s ports. More than 75 percent of France’s seaweed harvest comes from this area. The seaweed is used in fertilizer, cosmetics, and animal feed. Tourism is also important. All these industries were hard hit by the pollution from the Amoco Cadizoil spill.

Although not officially notified of the impending disaster, the French authorities were not caught by surprise. There were five naval observation posts and four signal posts along the coast near Ushant. The drifting tanker was spotted and tracked on radar. Messages flew back and forth, but everyone assumed that the situation was under control or that it was someone else’s problem. As a result, France’s Plan POLMAR, its strategy for coping with a big oil spill, was not put into effect until many hours after oil began pouring into the sea. This plan was designed to deal with a spill of 30,000 tons, about one-seventh the amount of oil aboard the Amoco Cadiz.

Meetings were convened in Paris and in Quimper, near Portsall, at about 2:00 a.m. on March 17. Plan POLMAR was rather vague; it did not designate anyone to be in charge of the operation. Both meetings reached the conclusion that early efforts needed to be made to stop the flow of oil from the ship and to protect the sensitive areas of the coast. Prompt action was difficult, because Plan POLMAR was unclear about specific authority, responsibility, and funding. Worse still, no large-scale practice run had ever been conducted.

When the ship ran aground, tanks containing about 70,000 tons of oil were sliced open by the rocks. That amount was enough to cause major problems, but when the remaining 150,000 tons escaped, the disaster became much worse. The French branch of Shell Oil made three smaller tankers available on March 17, and Amoco dispatched four large diesel-powered pumps from Detroit, Michigan. The plan was to pump oil out of the undamaged tanks into the smaller tankers. Since no ship ever intentionally went where the Amoco Cadiz drifted, there were no good nautical charts (maps) showing depth of water in the area. Before small tankers could move in close enough to receive oil pumped from the Amoco Cadiz, depth measurements were needed. Bad weather prevented the depth-measuring boat from performing its task. Meanwhile, the waves and rocks continued to damage the big tanker. Within two weeks, and before any oil could be pumped out of the tanks, every drop of oil was released into the sea.

French authorities considered setting the oil on fire. This can be an effective procedure, since burning oil produces mostly carbon dioxide and water vapor, and neither of these substances is toxic. Because oil mixes rapidly with seawater to form an emulsion that does not burn readily, however, burning must be done immediately after a spill. Concern about the politics of burning caused the authorities to hesitate, and soon burning was impossible.

Defensive efforts were under way to protect vulnerable areas. Floating barriers called oil booms were stretched across the entrances to inlets containing shellfish beds at Aber Ildut, Aber Benoit, Aber Wrach, and the Bay of Morlaix. In the end, these efforts failed. For various reasons, oil reached all the shellfish beds. Dispersant chemicals are another weapon for dealing with an oil spill. These chemicals break up the oil into small droplets. Although dispersing the oil does not eliminate it, small droplets decompose much faster than large slicks, and they do far less environmental damage. The dispersant chemicals themselves are somewhat toxic, so their use is controversial. As a compromise, authorities permitted the use of dispersants, but only at distances greater than three miles from shore. This excluded the dispersants from the areas where they might have been most effective.

Because burning was forbidden and dispersing was very limited, more than sixty thousand tons of oil washed up on the beaches of Brittany. In the end, oil covered about 250 miles of the coast. Heavy pollution reached east as far as Paimpol and southwest to the Bay of Douarnenez. A thin sheen was seen on the water near the islands of Guernsey and Jersey and near the beautiful island abbey Mont Saint-Michel.

Removal of oil from the beaches was accomplished by the crudest of methods. Vacuum trucks suctioned off what they could reach, but thousands of people using shovels and even spoons painstakingly scooped up oil, sand, and debris by hand. In mid-April, there were some sixty-five hundred people involved. About forty-five hundred of these people were military or police who were ordered to the scene. The remaining two thousand were volunteers.

Perhaps twenty thousand seabirds were killed by the pollution—a much lower death toll than might have been expected from the size of the spill. Free-swimming fish apparently fled the oil, since only ten thousand dead fish were found throughout the area. Oysters and clams were killed in massive numbers; crabs and lobsters were also heavily affected. Overall, in the affected areas about 5 percent of the sea plants and 30 percent of the sea animals were killed. The 1978 tourist season in Brittany was a disaster. There were seven million fewer tourists in that year than in 1977.

On April 18, 1984, U.S. district judge Frank J. McGarr found Standard Oil of Indiana and its subsidiaries fully responsible for all claims arising from the spill. The owners of the tug Pacific were not found liable in any way. Numerous changes have been made in the rules for designing and operating ships as a result of the Amoco Cadiz grounding. These rules should reduce, but cannot eliminate, the possibility of similar disasters.

Bibliography

Cahill, Richard A. Disasters at Sea: Titanic to Exxon Valdez. Kings Point, N.Y.: American Merchant Marine Foundation, 1990. Captain Cahill, a graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy with forty years experience at sea, brings the perspective of an expert to the analysis of the disaster. He probes issues whose importance other authors have failed to grasp. The book deals with the events leading up to the grounding, not with the cleanup.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Strandings and Their Causes. London: Fairplay, 1985. The account of the disaster in this book is more detailed than in Captain Cahill’s 1990 book. Again, the perspective of a man who has been a shipmaster himself gives this book a special place in the analysis of the grounding.

Chelminski, Rudolph. Superwreck. New York: William Morrow, 1987. Chelminski commits the unpardonable sin of calling Amoco Cadiz a boat, something no true seaman would ever do. Still, the book contains a clear, detailed account of events leading up to the grounding and of the major investigations that followed. Coverage of the spill and cleanup is brief. Eight pages of black-and-white photographs, mostly of the wrecked tanker, are included.

“Disaster off the Brittany Coast.” Time, April 3, 1978, 64-65. This brief early report, which deals mostly with the grounding of the ship, contains several vivid photographs. Another short article appears in the April 10, 1978, issue. The second article focuses on the spill and its cleanup.

Fairhall, David, and Philip Jordan. The Wreck of the Amoco Cadiz. New York: Stein and Day, 1980. These authors provide useful introductory material covering tanker accidents that preceded the Amoco Cadiz. Following a clear, brief account of events leading to the grounding, there is a detailed account of the spill and cleanup.

Freedman, Bill. Environmental Ecology: The Ecological Effects of Pollution, Disturbance, and Other Stresses. 2d ed. London: Academic Press, 1995. A well-illustrated textbook with plenty of case studies. Chapter 6 discusses the effects of oil pollution.

Grove, Noel. “Black Day for Brittany.” National Geographic, July, 1978, 124-135. Excellent color photographs. The wreck itself, the effects of the spill, and the cleanup effort are effectively depicted in eleven pages of pictures. A small map shows the extent of the pollution and the location of fishing centers and resort areas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Sailing with the Supertankers.” National Geographic, July, 1978, 102-124. Provides very useful background information and contains an excellent cutaway drawing of a large tanker as well as photographs of life aboard. An artist’s rendering shows the major oil trade-routes of the world.