Amoco Cadiz Oil Spill (1978)
The grounding of a supertanker on the Portsall rocks in Brittany, followed by fourteen years of litigation in Chicago that got around the limitation of liability by suing the American parent company.
The Amoco Cadiz, a Liberian-flagged supertanker, lost its rudder on March 16, 1978 and ran aground on the Portsall rocks off northern Finistère, then broke up and spilled most of its roughly 220,000 tons of crude along about 180 miles of coastline. The case became a textbook example of getting around limitation: the 1969 CLC convention would have capped the owner's debt at a modest amount, so France and the Breton towns sued the American parent company, Standard Oil of Indiana, in federal court in Chicago, alleging negligence in the ship's design, maintenance and operation. The American court held the group liable, which showed that a treaty cap protects only the registered owner. The disaster also led to the 1984 protocol, and then to those of 1992, which sharply raised the CLC and fund limits.
On January 24, 1992, the federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld Amoco's liability and increased the award; after fourteen years of litigation, the French state recovered about 1 billion francs and the syndicate of Breton towns about 230 million francs.
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