The St Mary's Lifeboat launched within an hour. A Westland Sea King helicopter scrambled from RNAS Culdrose on the Cornish mainland. The crew, mostly Polish, were lifted off the stricken vessel without serious injury and brought ashore. Later that afternoon they boarded the Scillonian III, the same ferry that brings holidaymakers from Penzance every summer, and were taken to the UK mainland. Cita herself stayed wedged on the rocks for several days, slowly listing as her hull failed beneath her. The wreck eventually slid off the ledge into deeper water. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch report, published in October 1998, was blunt: the watch officer had fallen asleep and the watch alarm had been switched off.

Cita was carrying 200 containers on a feeder run between major European ports. About twenty stayed on board after she sank. The rest tumbled into the sea and washed ashore across the Isles of Scilly or drifted away into the Celtic Sea, some travelling as far as the Cornish coast. The contents, as they spilled across the beaches, read like a strange surrealist inventory of late twentieth-century trade. Computer mice. Car tyres. Tobacco. House doors. Plywood. Plastic bags. And women's summer shorts, bound for the Republic of Ireland, in quantities sufficient to clothe most of the population of the islands several times over. For weeks afterwards, Quinnsworth supermarket bags bearing the logo of an Irish retailer turned up in use across St Mary's shops.

Most of the islanders threw themselves into the clean-up. Cargo had to come off the rocks and out of the dune systems, and a great deal of it was simply too useful to leave to weather. Doors went into sheds. Plywood went into outbuildings. Tyres, computer mice, tobacco; everything found a home. A couple of months after the wreck, St Mary's Quay had containers moored alongside it by local fishermen, waiting to be sold back to shipping companies or scrapped. Strictly speaking, this was contested ground. Eight extra police were brought over from Cornwall to take notes of who was removing what. Customs officers reminded everyone that the Merchant Shipping Acts of 1894 and 1906 required all recovered flotsam to be reported to the Receiver of Wreck. No criminal proceedings are recorded for the removal of Cita's cargo.

The Isles of Scilly knew what a bad wreck could do. In 1967 the supertanker Torrey Canyon had grounded on the Seven Stones reef to the east-northeast of the archipelago and spilled 119,000 tonnes of crude oil, which the Royal Air Force eventually tried to bomb into burning, with mixed results. The disaster shaped a generation of British environmental thinking. When Cita went on the rocks thirty years later, the prevailing emotion was relief. The salvage vessel Salvage Chief removed 98 percent of her fuel, about 90 tonnes, before she sank. Only a thin oil slick reached the coast. Oiled sand on the beach at Porth Hellick, part of the protected Higher Moors SSSI, was excavated and removed. Three tugs were dispatched to round up the containers still drifting in the Celtic Sea.

The Cita wreck has become a local touchstone, a marker dividing the 1990s into before and after. It is the kind of event that is told as a comedy in the pub and a tragedy in maritime law. Islanders remember the days when the beach yielded a wardrobe of unworn clothes, when computer mice came in by the thousand, when nobody quite knew what to do with a container of car tyres but everyone took a few home anyway. The Marine Accident Investigation Branch took the more sober view. A 3,000 tonne ship with a sleeping watchkeeper and a switched-off alarm had run hard onto the same rocks that had been killing sailors on this coast for centuries. The technology of 1997 had been beaten by a man who needed to stay awake and could not.

Coordinates: 49.9118°N, 6.2779°W. Newfoundland Point sits on the south-east coast of St Mary's, between Porth Hellick and the Giant's Castle headland. From 2,000 feet over the south coast the wreck site appears as a stretch of broken rock between two sandy bays. St Mary's Airport (EGHE) is about 1.5 kilometres to the north-west. The wreck itself now lies in deeper water below the cliff line. The cargo dispersed across an arc of beaches that includes Porth Hellick, Pelistry, and Old Town Bay.