Amoco Cadiz oil spill Amoco Cadiz oil spill The oil tanker "Amoco Cadiz" ran aground on Portsall Rocks, from the coast of Brittany, France, on 16 March 1978, and ultimately split in three and sank, all together resulting in the largest oil spill of its kind in history to that date. NOAA estimates that the total oil spill amounted to 220,880 metric tonnes of oil. En route from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam, Netherlands, via a scheduled stop at Lyme Bay, Great Britain, the ship encountered stormy weather with gale conditions and high seas while in the English Channel. At around 09:45, a heavy
History of the oil tanker market. By not buying the ships, but chartering, the bond rating of the oil companies was not affected, because the charter hire was not recognized as debt in that time. In 1934 H.T. Schierwater founded the International Tanker Owners’ Association — later International Association of Independent Tanker Owners or INTERTANKO — to protect the interests of these companies in a strongly fluctuating market. When World War II broke out in 1939, Roosevelt could not support the United Kingdom directly, as in 1935 the Shipping Neutrality Act was signed to prevent Mussolini from invading Ethiopia. A solution was found by flagging