Torrey Canyon grounding and the Santa Barbara Channel blowout in 1969, the 

 United States government began to take measures to meet the demands of the 

 public for clean beaches and waterways, as evidenced by the adoption of 

 legislation designed to assign responsibilities for the cleanup of oil spills, 

 determining the source, and assessing financial liability. 



During the winter of 1976-77, when the Avgo Merchant went aground on 

 Nantucket Shoals, the Grand Zenith disappeared off New England, and barges 

 were going aground in Buzzards Bay and the Hudson River, it may have seemed 

 as though some diabolical scheme were afoot to wreak havoc on U.S. shores. 

 Yet, on November 5, 1969, the tanker Keo , carrying 210,000 barrels of No. 4 

 fuel oil, 21,000 barrels more than the Argo Merchant, broke in half 120 miles 

 southeast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, but few scientists remembered that 

 accident when they predicted the devastation of Georges Bank fisheries by 

 Argo Merchant oil. Less dramatci, but important nonetheless, were spills of 

 No. 6 fuel oil into Buzzards Bay on February 9, 1969, from the tanker Algol, 

 and into Narragansett Bay in April 1973 from the tanker Pennant. In the 1969 

 Buzzards Bay spill, up to 4,000 barrels of No. 6 fuel oil spilled over a 

 period of days, in subfreezing temperatures, 45-knot winds, and 8- to 20-foot 

 seas. In the 1973 Pennant spill, over 2,000 barrels of No. 6 fuel oil came 

 ashore in Narragansett Bay near Bristol, Rhode Island, with tar balls and 

 "pancakes" of oil hitting Conimicut and Gaspee Points. The Argo Merchant 

 grounding on December 15, 1976, was not the first instance of oil pollution 

 in that area. It was not even the largest one, being somewhat smaller than 

 the Keo spill in 1969, and it is certainly not going to be the last such 

 incident off the coast of New England. 



In 1973, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) organized a Workshop on 

 Inputs, Fates, and Effects of Petroleum in the Marine Environment. This 

 workshop identified the sources of petroleum hydrocarbons entering the sea as 

 follows: natural seeps, losses during offshore production, transportation 

 (operations and accidents), refineries, atmospheric input, municipal wastes 

 (domestic and industrial), urban runoff, and river runoff. While there are 

 many contributors to marine pollution by oil, and some of them are quite 

 substantial, marine transportation is responsible for the largest single 

 share (35%) as shown in Figure 1-1 based on the findings of the NAS Workshop. 

 Of this 35%, one-seventh is derived from accidents involving vessels. 



The persistence of oil introduced into the marine environment has long 

 been a subject of controversy. The 1957 Tampico wreck resulted in a spill of 

 60,000 barrels of diesel fuel in a small bay on the Pacific coast of Baja 

 California. W. North of California Institute of Technology described the 

 recovery of the marine life in this bay as well underway within 1 year. 

 Ten years after the accident, the bay appeared to have been restored to 

 something approaching its original state, though the dominant organisms may 

 have been different from the ones predominating before the spill. It is 

 worth noting that news of the Tampico grounding did not reach marine scien- 

 tists until three weeks after the accident. 



There have been other accidents where little damage to the local envi- 

 ronment was apparent, even with materials more persistent than the diesel 

 fuel spilled by the Tampico. According to some investigators, no long-term 



