Whiddy disaster 40th anniversary - Lessons of tragedy still not applied

Last October, we marked the centenary of Ireland’s worst maritime disaster, the First World War sinking of RMS Leinster, shortly after it sailed from Dún Laoghaire. A German submarine condemned 564 souls to watery graves.

The death toll from the world’s worst industrial accident, at Bhopal, in Madhya Pradesh, in December 1984, officially cost 3,787 lives, but local sources insist more than 16,000 lives were lost when the pesticide methyl isocyanate leaked from a Union Carbide plant.

Tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of Ireland’s worst industrial accident and our greatest peacetime maritime disaster. In the early hours of January 8, 1979, 50 lives were lost when the oil tanker Betelgeuse became an inferno, one that led to explosion after explosion at the Whiddy Island oil terminal.

So ferocious was the fire that when rescue workers arrived, they could not, no matter how brave they were, even approach the fire. It was simply too dangerous.

It was also immediately obvious that none of those caught in it could survive. In all, 51 lives were lost — 42 Frenchmen, seven Irishmen, and one Englishman died on that night, while Dutch diver Jaap Pols was lost later in a salvage operation.

That death toll was shocking, but for hours after the fire began — a contested point at the subsequent tribunal — there were very real fears for the town. So intense was the fire that when firemen hosed one of the refinery’s holding tanks to prevent it spreading, the tanks were so hot, each holding 80,000 tonnes of oil, that the water turned to steam.

“There were explosions and fire going into the air every five minutes... for it to heat the metal in those tanks, it was some heat,” said fireman Brendan O’Donoghue years later.

The details of that night are still harrowing, but events before and after it were shocking, and remain so.

A decade earlier, Gulf Oil removed a Bailey bridge connecting the jetty to Whiddy Island so two tankers could berth at once, doubling the jetty’s capacity.

It has long been contended that had that escape route existed, fewer lives might have been lost. If that profit-before-people decision seems a familiar theme, the tribunal under Mr Justice Declan Costelloe raised the kind of issues faced by nearly every tribunal since. He described evidence offered by five Gulf employees about the time the fire began as “fallacious”.

“Gulf employees failed to tell the truth,” he wrote in July 1980.

The following March, four local men were charged with perjury, but the case was thrown out at Bantry District Court. Subsequent efforts to have the case heard in the Circuit Criminal Court also failed.

Any sense of déjà vu is sharpened by an accusation from award-winning international lawyer, Michael Kingston, who lost his father, Tim, in the catastrophe. He points out that many of the report’s recommendations have not been put in place.

Government has not enacted laws on corporate manslaughter which, he says, could have been used after the disaster.

“Why not? What are they afraid of?” he asks.

That these questions are unanswered 40 years after the catastrophe, and after many other hard lessons, shows where real power resides and how dishearteningly feeble government can be.