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 the company had 34 steam-driven oil tankers. Standard Oil started building tankers the same way as Shell and by 1900 owned around 60 tankers. From 1912 "Compañía Mexicana de Petróleo El Aguila" ("Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company") — founded in 1909 by Weetman Pearson to develop the newly found Mexican oil fields, nationalized in 1938 as Pemex — also had its own tanker fleet. They quickly adopted Isherwood's new longitudinal framing system that allowed much larger ships and a simpler construction process. Just before World War I it owned a fleet of 20 tankers. Standard Oil did not participate directly in