The Price of Disaster

The vast oil slick that floated ashore in Cornwall and Brittany after the supertanker Torrey Canyon sank in 1967 killed thousands of sea birds and marine animals and polluted miles of beaches. This ecological disaster has now also exacted its toll from the operator of the tanker, Union Oil Co. of California, and its Liberian owner, the Barracuda Tanker Corp. Last week the companies announced that they had agreed to pay $7.2 million in damages for their responsibility in the accident.

Soon after the Torrey Canyon sank, both Britain and France filed claims amounting to more than $15 million against Union Oil and Barracuda, and there were scores of private suits. Yet, surprisingly, there was little in international law to cover the liability of ships on the high seas for damages from pollution.

Four months after the shipwreck, the British government attached a warrant of arrest to the mainmast of a Union Oil tanker that had stopped for an hour in Singapore, and the company had to post an $8.4 million bond to get the tanker back. That seizure may well have been the key action in two years of legal maneuverings that led Union Oil to agree out of court to pay Britain and France $3.6 million apiece, 70% of which will be covered by insurance.

By coincidence, delegates from 49 countries are now meeting in Brussels to consider international agreements that will assign liability for pollution damages on the high seas. But to date there is little consensus among the other representatives on what the new law should say. Also unsolved is an even more practical problem: how safely to remove the oil from a sinking ship before it leaks out and pollutes the sea. The U.S. Coast Guard may have one answer. It is testing large, rubber-coated bladders that can be carried in a plane, parachuted into the water near a foundering tanker and inflated. Once inflated, each one could hold 140,000 gallons of oil pumped from the tanker and be easily towed to shore.

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