L'Amoco ☠️

16 March 1978: the VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) Amoco Cadiz ran aground on the Portsall Rocks off the coast of Brittany, France. It remains one of the most significant and extensively studied environmental disasters in history

It's a brutal incident in that this was the first time something like that had happened in peacetime - and at such a scale

And, for better or worse, France took it on the chin: Amoco fought them tooth and nail over blame, recovery, and disposal of the leftovers for so long that the government declared actual war on the poor, still bobbing hulk - having the French air force bomb the wreck not once, but twice

Cadiz was almost within swimming distance of the French coast - and its bow just jutted out of the water like a perverse iceberg that fouled up nearly every photo of the quaint village directly opposite - and the French got angrier each and every time eyeballs noted that awkward snoot

The impressive thing, as stated above, the bow maintained buoyancy for all those years: the seafloor is a flat desert of sand and kelp, so the Cadiz snoot is at that angle purely through trapped air... and you can see it more clearly by looking at the starboard side - which shows the amount of travel tides cause through anchor chain scraping

French sport divers frequent the wreck during the short season where currents aren't as lethal - and there's a considerable amount of ship left that nature hasn't worn away after the bombing campaign... but this little cottage industry is comprised of almost 100% French divers, as Cadiz lost its notoriety over the years to Exxon Valdez and other accidents

The French have even created a language convention just for this single event: "L'Amoco" is their pet epithet that gets cursed every year when the nation remembers - somewhat similar to "9/11", but angrier in the social psyche

Sure, Amoco eventually got fined - the largest in history at the time, but oil companies never feel it... even BP, when they eventually had to pay thirteen billion dollars for Deepwater Horizon: the cash they rake in hourly makes these payouts a blip that gets amortized on the spreadsheets

People who were involved with the cleanup have almost universally reported health problems - because this one of the first incidents of its kind, and there weren't much in the way of safety guidelines beyond wearing lots of rubber: the only popular analog is 9/11 responders - but their cases are different due to the number of different compounds that got aerosolized... but with Cadiz, it was mostly dispersed VOC in the air

• Chronic exposure, not acute accidents

• Most cleanup workers weren’t hit with a single dramatic exposure. Instead, they spent:

• weeks to months

• working long days

• in cold, windy conditions

• surrounded by agitated, evaporating crude and dispersant residues

• benzene risk was poorly communicated outside industrial settings

• organic vapor respirators were not standard issue

• nobody was monitoring air concentrations in rural Brittany

• there were no pre-exposure health baselines

• medical follow-up was inconsistent or nonexistent

• symptoms that emerged years later were easy to dismiss as unrelated

The sad statistic about Valdez is that she was patched up before sailing for another 30ish years - mostly under her original name, but after ExxonMobil faced the banning of single-hull designs in every market it did business, Valdez was sold to lesser-knowns for around $50,000,000... before, eventually, going to the breakers under the name Dong Fang Ocean