Torrey Canyon Disaster (1967)
The grounding of a tanker on the Seven Stones, between Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, which exposed the lack of any international oil pollution compensation regime and gave rise to the CLC convention and the IOPC Funds.
The Torrey Canyon, a Liberian-flagged tanker owned by a Bermuda company, ran aground on the Seven Stones reef on March 18, 1967 with about 120,000 tons of Kuwaiti crude, then the largest ship ever lost. The oil fouled the coasts of Cornwall and then Brittany, and the British government eventually had the wreck bombed to burn off the cargo. The casualty exposed three gaps in the law of the time: an owner sheltered behind a flag and a shell company was hard to reach, liability required proof of fault, and the owner's limitation of liability, computed on a ship reduced to a wreck, covered nothing of substance. The response was the 1969 CLC convention, which imposes strict liability on the owner backed by compulsory insurance, followed by the 1971 convention creating a fund financed by oil receivers, the forerunner of the IOPC Funds.
Unable to serve the owner, the United Kingdom had the Lake Palourde, a sister ship of the Torrey Canyon, arrested in Singapore four months after the grounding. In November 1969, the United Kingdom and France, which had claimed $22 million, settled for $7.2 million split equally; the CLC convention was adopted in Brussels on November 29, 1969 and entered into force on June 19, 1975.
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