“It was such a shock to the local community,” said Gordon James, then director of Friends of the Earth in Wales.<\/p>\n
“I remember going down to Tenby and seeing the beautiful North Beach covered in black and there were people there in tears.<\/p>\n
“We set up a legal team and we interviewed a lot of people… and the evidence was damning.<\/p>\n
“The tugboat men and the marine pilots, they’d issued warnings that safety was being compromised [at the port], there were cutbacks and they were saying more or less it’s a disaster waiting to happen.”<\/p>\n
An inexperienced pilot had been tasked with taking the tanker into Milford Haven and “then we learnt that the radar [at the port] hadn’t been working properly for months”.<\/p>\n
Milford Haven Port Authority was eventually fined \u00a34m, which at the time was the biggest penalty ever issued for a pollution case in Britain.<\/p>\n
It was later reduced on appeal to \u00a3750,000 to enable the port to make changes to improve safety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It was such a shock to the local community,” said Gordon James, then director of Friends of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":284531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[273,111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-284530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/284531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}