She was a thousand feet of steel moving at nearly full speed through one of the narrowest, most treacherous funnels in the Strait of Magellan. On the evening of August 9, 1974, the supertanker Metula was threading the First Narrows when she cut the corner too sharply and struck a rocky shoal at roughly 14.5 knots, grinding to a halt with her forward compartments torn open. Crude oil began pouring into the strait almost immediately. It was the first time a Very Large Crude Carrier had been involved in a major spill, and the wreck would leave marks on this lonely coastline that outlasted nearly everyone who responded to it.
The Metula was an enormous ship, 1,067 feet long with a deadweight capacity of 206,000 tons, sailing from Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia with more than 196,000 tons of light Arabian crude bound for Chile's national oil company at Quintero. The First Narrows is wider than three kilometers, but width means little against the strait's ferocious tides and currents, and a vessel of this size handled like a sliding building. Navigation aids in the region were minimal. The ship hit the shoal and lost thousands of tons of cargo in the first hours. A day later, she swung to starboard, holing and flooding her engine room. The U.S. Coast Guard, called in at Chile's request, helped strip the remaining oil from the crippled hull.
In all, the Metula released roughly 47,000 tonnes of light crude and between 3,000 and 4,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. The savage southern seas churned it into a thick water-in-oil emulsion, a foamy mousse that drifted onto the beaches of northern Tierra del Fuego. Then came the most unusual decision of the whole disaster: nothing. Because the coastline was so impossibly remote, no real cleanup was ever mounted. The oil was simply left to the elements. On many shores it hardened into asphalt pavement; one marsh took deposits of mousse that were still visible two decades later. By 1998, most had finally broken down, but sheltered asphalt remained, making the Metula spill among the longest-lasting oil contaminations ever recorded.
The wildlife had no such patience to spare. A single survey on September 14 and 15, 1974 counted hundreds of dead birds heavily fouled with oil along one stretch of coast: 408 cormorants, 66 Magellanic penguins, 23 ducks, and 84 seagulls. By the following February, estimates of total bird deaths ran from 3,000 to 4,000, with at least one far higher figure proposed. Tens of thousands of penguins nested on islands in the area, and concern for their fate ran high. Along the tidal zone, mussels, limpets, and starfish were coated black. These were the foundation of a food web that local communities had drawn on for generations, the shell middens behind their homes a record of that long reliance, and the spill struck it at the base.
For the fishermen of the strait, the damage was immediate and personal. The contaminated waters drove them elsewhere, cutting them off from the grounds where they hunted sea bass between seasons of king crab. The fishery was effectively unusable for a full year, and the quality of the catch stayed poor long after. The wider economic harm to Chile was judged minor in national terms, but the cost of even attempting a response, the logistics, the manpower, the sheer remoteness, was estimated between 25 and 50 million dollars. Two years on, parts of the affected coast still looked devastated, with no sign of vegetation returning. The Metula became a hard lesson: in a place this far from help, a supertanker's mistake could write itself into the land for a generation.
The Metula grounding site sits near 52.5 S, 69.65 W, in the First Narrows (Primera Angostura) of the Strait of Magellan, along the south shore between Punta Piedra and Punta Anegada on northern Tierra del Fuego. From the air the narrows form a dramatic constriction in the strait where strong tidal currents are often visible as rips and standing waves. The nearest major airport is Presidente Carlos Ibáñez del Campo International at Punta Arenas (ICAO SCCI), to the northwest. Río Gallegos in Argentina (ICAO SAWG) lies to the north. Expect powerful winds, fast-moving weather, and low visibility common to the strait; clear days offer the best view of the channel and the Tierra del Fuego coastline.