Department of History environmental historian Dr Rob Lambert was involved in 50th anniversary commemorations of the Torrey Canyon oil tanker disaster. The 13th largest supertanker in the world at the time, Torrey Canyon ran aground on the Seven Stones Reef midway between the tip of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly on 18 March 1967. She was laden with 117,000 tonnes of Kuwaiti crude oil.
On the 40th anniversary in March 2007, Dr Lambert was part of a BBC Radio 4 documentary 'Torrey Canyon: the toxic tide', produced by David Parkinson and presented by Sarah Pitt. Having sailed out to the Seven Stones Reef in autumn 2016, for this, the 50th anniversary, Rob was commissioned to write a Talking Point essay titled ‘Torrey Canyon: the wreck that changed our world’, for the April edition of BBC Wildlife with a NRS figure of 241,000. Rob was also interviewed by Adam Vaughan, Energy Correspondent of the Guardian, for an essay on Torrey Canyon’s legacy (‘UK’s worst environmental disaster 50 years on’) printed in the newspaper on Saturday 18 March 2017.
Posted on Tuesday 11th April 2017