Operation Canute

The press played it up as one of the decade's worst disasters. In a slow Easter week on Fleet Street, Britain's newspapers called it another Battle of Britain. A few correspondents even quoted Churchill's immortal words of that dark hour: "We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds." Fight what? Oil.

By some fateful miscalculation, the U.S.-owned oil tanker Torrey Canyon, en route from Kuwait to Wales, had run aground and begun to break up on a reef 18 miles off the southwest tip of Britain; part of its 118,000 tons of crude oil began leaking into the sea. Like great oozy creatures from 20,000 leagues under, oil slicks more than 20 miles long were soon slinking toward southwest Britain's golden holiday beaches, which draw $300 million a year from tourists.

A Bucket Brigade. As consternation spread in the coastal counties of Devon and Cornwall, Prime Minister Wilson set up a ministerial-level emergency committee to coordinate local and national measures, named it "Operation Canute," after the 11th century English king who ordered the waves to recede--and got dunked. When all hopes of salvaging the tanker and its remaining cargo died, Wilson ordered several flights of fighter-bombers to zero in on the Torrey Canyon, then headed for his vacation retreat on the oil-threatened Scilly Isles to watch the action. For three days, the planes plastered the Torrey Canyon with bombs, kerosene, napalm and rockets. At least one-third of the oil cargo went up in flames.

To fight the remaining oil at sea, six Royal Navy ships and a small armada of civilian tugs and trawlers scattered thousands of gallons of oil-dispersing detergent. Along the beaches, British troops and civilians bulldozed oily areas, scattered more detergent and strung out floating antisubmarine "booms" to corral the surface scum.

In Cornwall, where 100 miles of beaches were polluted, almost everyone volunteered to help. Hundreds of men, women and children turned up with buckets and watering cans, formed human chains to rush the detergent from trucks into the water. At St. Ives, the town's entire 27-boat fishing fleet patrolled offshore areas with detergent. At least 15,000 sea birds were killed by the oil, and Britons rallied to save thousands more by cleaning their feathers with absorbent compounds.

August as Usual. The first dire predictions that the oil would pollute England's beaches for ten or 15 years were soon proved wrong. By week's end, while huge pools of slick remained offshore in a calm sea--thus remaining vulnerable to continued attack by detergents--the defenders had managed to keep sufficiently ahead of the incoming oil to clear most of the beaches. Prime Minister Wilson insisted that all the beaches and the sea would be clear by summer, urged vacationers not to cancel their plans. To illustrate his faith in his own prediction, he announced: "I shall be holidaying on the Scillies as usual in August."

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