It’s hard to believe that it was 20
years ago last Monday that the Sea Empress became stranded at the entrance to
Milford Haven, causing a spillage of 72,000 tones of crude oil and catastrophic
damage to the Pembrokeshire coast. Thousands of seabirds were killed and 120
miles of beaches were contaminated, stretching from St Brides Bay around the
southern Pembrokeshire coast and into Carmarthen. Some beaches were buried under a foot of oil.
And although the immediate cleanup took place remarkably quickly, at a cost of
£60m, it took the best part of a decade before the ecology of the shoreline
fully recovered.
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| Sea Empress stranded off St Ann'e Head at the entrance Milford Haven |
Such anniversaries always raise the
question: could it happen again? Much has improved. In particular a much enhanced
port control operation and command structure means the immediate circumstances
that led to the spillage would be unlikely to recur. An inexperienced pilot was
allowed to guide the Sea Empress in and took her too close to the north shore
which led to the grounding. That was on a late Friday evening. By the middle of
the following day only about 250 tons of oil had been lost, five Milford Haven tugs
had managed to free her from the rocks and there was an option to tow her
further out to sea away from immediate danger. The imminence of a Force 9 gale
made this a pressing necessity.
The pilot aboard the Sea Empress radioed
the Port Authority’s Control Room to ask permission from the Harbour Master and
received the following, now infamous reply: “I agree with you but I have a room
full of men saying No.” They included men from the salvagers, the oil and
insurance companies, the coastguard, and the Department of Transport Pollution
Control Unit. Their collective and soon to be mistaken view was that the Sea
Empress could be emptied of her cargo where she was and then towed to safety.
In the event the Force 9 gale duly
arrived, the towlines connecting the tugs broke and the Sea Empress was thrown
about the rocks for twelve hours, losing most of her cargo of crude in the
process. As I say, lessons have been learnt from the decisions that led up to
this disaster.
But in another respect thre lessons are
being forgotten. In the wake of the disaster, emergency towing vessels with
much greater capacity than those operating in the Haven, were put in place
around the coast of the United Kingdom - at Dover, Orkney, Stornoway, and
Falmouth, the last providing cover for the Welsh coast.
However, in 2011 the Conservative
government scrapped this fleet, as a cost saving measure, although one tug in
Orkney won a reprieve until March this year.
Questioned about this last week, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency
said, “The government believes that responsibility for
ensuring the operational safety of ships is properly a matter for the
commercial shipping industry, working in partnership with the tug and salvage
industries. It does not believe that it is appropriate for the taxpayer to fund
this provision."
Meanwhile, other European countries, including Spain, France,
Norway and Germany are maintaining government financed emergency towing
vessels. And, of course, since the Sea Empress disaster we have much larger
vessels coming into Milford Haven, carrying liquefied natural gas, a much more
unstable and dangerous cargo. We’ll just have to hope that this further example
of the Conservative government’s ideologically-driven cost-cutting doesn’t
end-up in a false economy of cataclysmic proportions.
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