The Stena Immaculate
Katrina Porteous on the horror of two ships colliding
A few miles out at sea on the horizon a cargo ship is heading south. It is stacked with red and blue containers like a child’s building blocks. Container ships are so common on the North Sea I don’t pay them much attention, although sometimes in stormy weather they set a course through a deep channel close to shore, and often I see their lights at night, passing the rocky Farne Islands, where the famous Longstone lighthouse beams its warning.
We’re between a full and a new moon just now, so the tides are small. The strandline from the big spring tides, over a week ago, crackles with dry bladderwrack and sizzles with flies. The sand is meshed with a chainstitch of ringed plover and redshank footprints, and stippled by their probing beaks. At this time of year many birds are returning from their winter habitats. The sea, shore and dunes are a feeding ground for exhausted travellers.
A few weeks ago, in the early hours of Monday March 10th, a cargo vessel passed my house, to the east of the Longstone. If I had looked out in the dark I would have seen its lights. The German-owned, Portuguese-registered Solong frequently travelled this route between Grangemouth, on the Firth of Forth, and the port of Rotterdam. I have probably seen it hundreds of times. Eight hours later it reached the entrance to the River Humber, around 130 miles to the south. There, for reasons yet unknown, at 9.47 am and travelling at 16.4 knots, it struck the American oil tanker Stena Immaculate that was lying at anchor. There was a huge explosion. Both ships burst into flames. Astonishingly, only one life was lost, from the Solong. The container ship’s Russian captain was arrested on suspicion of gross negligence manslaughter, and awaits trial.
The news that day was full of the disaster. The tanker was carrying 220,000 barrels of jet fuel destined for the US military. Jet fuel, a form of kerosene, is much lighter than crude oil. Instead of a black slick it forms a thin, toxic film, which spreads over a large area. Environmental organisations expressed fears for protected bird and seal colonies along the coast, for plant life on dunes and marshes, and for marine organisms, especially those within protected areas close to the site of the disaster.
The day after the incident, I brooded on the possible repercussions. A cold breeze blew from the north, potentially carrying oil and other pollutants south from the Humber to the Lincolnshire and Norfolk coast. I read that the Coastguard, Environment Agency and various NGOs were monitoring the situation with aerial, marine and shore-based surveillance.
Suddenly I remembered how, here in Northumberland in the late 1960s, I would regularly come home from the rockpools with spots of sticky black oil clinging to my hands and clothes. Sometimes I would find a poor disorientated, dishevelled guillemot, oil clagging its feathers — a death sentence.
We children would speculate about where the oil came from. Hundreds of miles away on the Cornish coast, at just this time of year — March 18th 1967 — an American oil tanker, registered in Liberia and chartered to BP, struck rock between the mainland and the Scilly Isles, spilling an estimated 94-164 million litres of crude oil. It formed a nightmarish slick, said to cover 270 square miles. The Torrey Canyon became a byword for everything that could go wrong with the burgeoning oil industry. Attempts to stop the oil spreading only made it worse. The Royal Navy and Air Force bombed the tanker, dropping 50,000 litres of aviation fuel and 14,000 litres of liquefied petroleum jelly in an attempt to burn the slick away. Efforts to contain it with foam filled booms were mostly ineffectual. Strong detergents or solvents caused yet more environmental damage. Over 100 miles of the Cornish coast and 50 miles of the French were contaminated. Oil soaked into the sand. Eventually some of it was scooped up and dumped into a quarry on Guernsey, where clean up has taken nearly half a century.
It is highly unlikely that the spots of crude oil on my hands and on the guillemots’ feathers really had floated all the way from Cornwall to Northumberland. More likely, it had not travelled far at all. In those days tankers were still sometimes – illegally – flushed out at sea, releasing oil to wash up on the tide. The Torrey Canyon disaster led to many changes in international environmental regulation, and new, less harmful practices were adopted.
Fortunately, the Stena Immaculate was no Torrey Canyon. Two days after the Solong ran into her, the Coastguard stated that there were no further reports of pollution from either vessel. Reuters reported that only two of 18 fuel tanks had leaked, or about 10% of the cargo. Fires on the Solong were greatly reduced. It seemed that the worst disaster had been averted.
The story faded from the headlines. But fresh horrors were to come. A few days later, the press reported that billions of plastic pellets had spilled from the Solong’s containers. These semi-translucent raw plastic fragments, between 1 and 5mm long, are moulded into the everyday items we all use. They have become so ubiquitous that in the 1990s a new word was coined for them: ‘nurdles’. Immense quantities, some charred by the intense heat and melted into clumps of burnt plastic resin, were blown south by strong winds onto the beaches and nature reserves of Lincolnshire and Norfolk. Local councils employed professional clean up teams to remove as much as they could with vacuums, sieves and ATVs; but along many miles of beach and inaccessible tidal salt marshes, a total clean up is impossible.
Seabirds like guillemots and terns choke on plastic pellets, mistaking them for fish eggs. Their young have been found starved, their crops stuffed with plastic. Fish swallow them, too. As the pellets break into ever smaller pieces, they get into the food chain, affecting the health of larger creatures, such as seals, porpoises, even humans.
I poke about among the dried wrack on the tideline. So many miles to the north, I haven’t found any nurdles from the Solong. But here’s a chunk of disintegrating polystyrene, part of an old fishing float, crumbling into tiny grains among fragments of crab shell and desiccated kelp. There’s a formidable amount of plastic tangled among the seaweed strands, on its way to becoming almost indistinguishable from them: scraps of blue knitted net, twists of frayed black and green polypropylene rope, fragments of an ancient polythene bag, a cup, a shoe — ravelled, denaturing, in transition. One day these scraps will form a band of sediment in the rock, a final monument to who we were. Although it’s the big disasters, the Torrey Canyons, that we remember, it is the slow accumulation of small harms like these that do the insidious damage day by day.
Katrina Porteous' fourth poetry collection, Rhizodont, was published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2024 and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot prize