On this day in Wembury — 16 May 1990
The Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph carried alarming national headlines as a thick oil slick washed ashore along the South Devon coast, fouling beaches from Kingsbridge to Wembury. The slick, traced to a breached supertanker off the coast, had spread rapidly with the tide, coating up to 15 miles of shoreline in black oil and threatening the region’s most treasured marine habitats.
Hundreds of council workers were mobilised to begin a large-scale cleanup, joined by volunteers and officials from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. At Wembury, the tide brought the slick into contact with the rocky foreshore and its famous intertidal pools, smothering limpets, seaweed, and shellfish that supported the local food chain. Birds including cormorants, kittiwakes, and gulls were among the first victims, their plumage thickened by oil.
The map printed with the report showed the full extent of the damage, with Wembury sitting squarely within the “area of coast hit by oil slick.” The event became one of the worst environmental incidents to strike South Devon since the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967. It also reinforced the case for creating better local safeguards — lessons that later shaped Wembury’s role as the South West’s leading Marine Conservation Area, founded to protect exactly the kind of wildlife that suffered that spring.
(Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph, 16 May 1990)