68 / Chapter 3
ing spill would have amounted to only one-fi fth of what the Torrey
Canyon lost. The spill would have been a local crisis rather than an
international one. Such was the pace of technology.^24
The incident brought global attention to a new hazard: major
oil spills at sea. As one observer wrote, “The Torrey Canyon disaster
revealed ignorance. Man had fi gured out how to move enormous
quantities of oil but not how to cope when the system fails on a
grand scale.”^25 According to another, the people of England and
France “reacted to the menace with fear, rage and wonder.”^26 Every
aspect brought lessons for a world unprepared for a disaster of this
kind. Existing techniques for oil spill response were ineffective in
such a massive incident.
Every oil spill, like every hurricane or earthquake, is unique.
Each one involves different factors of setting, weather, type of oil,
population, and severity of damage to the ship. Nevertheless, the
response strategies used in similar types of disasters are the same.
For oil spills, the response is most effective if it begins very quickly,
while the oil is still on the water rather than on the beach and before
the waves begin to break up the larger slicks. Techniques used to
collect oil on the water’s surface include containing the oil with
mechanical booms and skimming up as much as possible. Other
common techniques include burning and spreading chemical dis-
persants that “act like liquid soap to break up surface oil slicks into
tiny droplets that must then be driven by wind and wave action
into the water columns and diluted with huge volumes of water.”
Dispersants have been called “the oilmen’s way of solving pollu-
tion by dilution... out of sight, out of mind.”^27 Although the sur-
face looks clean, the droplets of oil remain highly toxic. Moreover,
the dispersants themselves are hazardous chemicals.
In the case of the Torrey Canyon, rough seas foiled the plan
to contain the oil using an enormous plastic boom. In Britain, the
response involved the repeated use of excessively large amounts of
dispersants. It was not known at the time that the dispersants were
themselves highly toxic and would cause extensive environmen-
tal damage of their own. The British government also tried burn-
ing the slick and fi nally resorted to bombing the site to reduce the