Reader's Blog: Whiddy Island disaster - ‘Those poor men lost lives, lost everything’
On the morning of January 8, 1979, I was on a night shift at Great Island Power Station in Wexford, working as an operating technician, looking after one of Ireland’s largest steam turbine generators of the time (the 120MW unit 3).
At around 6.30am, I turned on the radio in the control room to listen to RTÉ’s early-morning news bulletin.
The headline item was the Whiddy Island disaster; ‘Explosion of the oil tanker Betelgeuse in Bantry Bay, with the loss of many lives.’
After the initial shock had worn off, I telephoned my father with the news.
My reason was to stem from several years previously when my Dad was called to the High Court in Dublin — up against ‘wigs and gowns’, while John Baldwin represented himself — to be humiliated (despite the sympathy of the judge) by those legal persons representing the Gulf Oil Company.
Gulf Oil had denied my father any compensation derived from a previous spillage of oil into Bantry Bay when my father had been buying herrings from the local skiffs and processing the (salted) fish into barrels.
All of John Baldwin’s fish on the pier at Bantry had been declared condemned by a local health inspector, and around 20 tonnes that were ready for shipping to Holland had to be destroyed.
I will remember until my dying day my father’s words after that terrible incident at the Whiddy Oil terminal in Bantry; ‘I only lost my livelihood, Thomas, but those poor men have lost their lives, lost everything, and all because of Gulf Oil’s continued ineptitude and carelessness’.
