HELLISH BLAST FROM OUR PAST
Beirut shock wave is sure to resonate with the people of Bantry Bay
IT is the videos that spread rapidly across social media – uploaded in the minutes when almost no-one knew what had really happened – that will remain for ever seared into the minds of many of us who look back on last week’s explosion in Beirut in years to come.
The images showed that horrifying, almost surreal, double blast, followed by a shock wave of such force that people kilometres away were knocked off their feet as the fronts of their offices, their shops, their homes came crashing in around them.
Clearly, watching such a thing through the screen of a phone or television could never even begin to give any true sense of how it would feel to bear witness to such horror in person – and most of us can count ourselves lucky that we likely never will.
However, in one Irish town, there will have been chilling resonances of a disaster that took place just over four decades ago, claiming the lives of 51 people.
The Whiddy Island disaster has faded in the minds of many outside west Cork and, among a younger generation, is hardly known about at all. However, a deep sense of injustice and hurt still burns in those who lost family and friends on that January night in 1979.
In the mid-1960s, Whiddy Island, in Bantry Bay, was chosen by the Gulf Oil Corporation as a site for its new European terminal, which would be completed to great fanfare in 1969. The location fulfilled a number of crucial criteria for Gulf Oil, chief among those being its deep Atlantic waters deemed ideal for docking the giant supertankers that were being built in the wake of the Suez Crisis. The oil companies in Middle Eastern countries turned to these enormous vessels which were too large to pass through the Suez Canal and sailed them around the landmass of the African continent and northwards to Europe.
OVER the next decade, however, world economics once again rapidly changed and, by 1979, Whiddy Island had been left behind, becoming a neglected and underused terminal. It was to this crumbling and poorly maintained facility that the ageing French oil tanker MV Betelgeuse would sail and begin berthing at an offshore jetty on January 4, its arrival being something of a surprise. Betelgeuse had originally been destined for the port of Leixoes in Portugal, but a series of foreboding mishaps had occurred during its journey from Saudi Arabia that led to the fateful decision in late December 1978 to chart a course for Bantry Bay.
Even all these years later, the exact sequence of events that unfolded leading up to the early hours of January 8 are unclear and still argued over. What is known is that a crack opened in the hull of Betelgeuse and a small fire broke out on the ship. With about a third of its cargo of 114,000 metric tonnes of crude oil still on board, there could only be one terrible result as the fire rapidly spread.
The explosion was heard throughout west Cork and residents living across the bay in Bantry reported feeling their homes rocking as if by an earthquake due to the force of the blast. Debris rained down on the town and parts of the ship were found up to 10km away in the surrounding countryside. As the dozens of residents of Whiddy fled across the waters to the safety of Bantry, the normally pitch-black nighttime winter skies were bright with hellish flames. ‘It was like daylight going across the harbour,’ one later recalled. ‘The light from the flames, the flames were unbelievable. It was like four o’clock in the afternoon... It was like Pompeii.’
The explosion was so severe and the temperature of the resulting inferno so high that, of the 50 people who died that night, 23 were killed the back offshore never to as land, they identified. jetty, while stood unable many stranded Some others to were get on may the ship. have Due been to asleep the dangerous on board gases being emitted following the blast, it would be weeks before rescue workers could even begin to approach the site.
The tragedy did not just affect west Cork – 42 of those killed were French, seven were Irish and one was English. A Dutch diver died a few weeks later during the salvage operation.
The reality is that, as devastating as the incident was, it could have been for and the Gulf even bravery Oil worse. workers of Had the who it firefighters not battled been to stop the blaze from reaching the island’s onshore oil storage tanks, the whole town of Bantry could have suffered a fate similar to that of Beirut. And as appears to be the case in Beirut, the genesis of the Co. Cork disaster lay in neglect and poor safety measures. And then, according to the findings of a tribunal report into the catastrophe, there was an attempted cover-up by senior Gulf Oil staff members. Fingers were pointed in various directions as to who or what was responsible for what happened and, as so often happens, the victims’ loved ones have been left to this day with questions that others never want answered.
That tribunal laid blame at the feet of Total Oil – the owners of Betelgeuse – and Gulf Oil, including its terminal controller, who the tribunal concluded was not at his post when the fire broke out.
HOWEVER, survivors and grieving families say the State itself still has serious questions to answer over why Gulf Oil’s safety standards at Whiddy were allowed to slip so badly and why charges over the tragedy were later dismissed.
Just over a year ago, in August 2019, an application was made to the High Court by relatives of the victims to open a new coroner’s inquiry and change the cause listed on the death certificates to unlawful death. They are also demanding an extensive apology from the Government over the lead-up to and the fallout from the disaster, and they want the State to implement all outstanding maritime regulation to prevent any further loss of life from happening.
Michael Kingston, who celebrated his fourth birthday the day before his father Tim died in the disaster, is now a leading maritime lawyer who is still fighting for justice. He has called the failures that led up to the tragedy ‘some of the worst derelictions of duty in relation to safety in world maritime history’.
Some major changes to national safety legislation did come in the wake of the incident, and the Whiddy Island oil terminal is still in use today, now owned by US firm Zenith Energy. It received an unlikely boost during the Covid-19 pandemic, with oil storage becoming highly sought-after. Bantry itself, so badly affected in the years following 1979, once again became a thriving town, less dramatically of course than Beirut, which shed its recent war-torn past to become an optimistic, cosmopolitan Mediterranean city.
However, it is impossible to deny that what happened that night in Bantry Bay and last week in Beirut were the epitome of that clichéd phrase: accidents waiting to happen. Wherever safety standards are allowed to slip and bad decisions are made, human life is put at risk.
For those families still waiting for answers more than four decades after losing those they loved, the pain of seeing mistakes being repeated over and over with the same terrible result must be devastating. As must the sense that, with every year that passes, their story fades a little more, and with it their hopes of justice.