The nice thing about natural disasters is that you always know who to blame them on: your god, your god's greatest mortal enemy or a kraken. Unfortunately, we don't have the same luxury when it comes to catastrophes brought on by man -- especially when all of man's bright ideas for fixing them just keep making them worse.

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It's probably hard to believe now, but BP hasn't always enjoyed the stellar reputation it does today. Back in 1967, British Petroleum chartered an oil tanker named the Torrey Canyon to deliver a mess of crude oil to a refinery in Wales. This wasn't just any run-of-the mill tanker; it was the world's first supertanker, capable of hauling 120,000 tons of oil at a time. And unfortunately, its huge capacity for oil-carrying was just about all that was "super" about the Torrey Canyon, because if that tanker had had the power of flight, it would be in a totally different article right now.



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So you can probably see where this is heading.

The Torrey Canyon's problems started with Capt. Pastrengo Rugiati, who, like most Italian oiler tanker captains, had a few bad habits. One was that he liked shortcuts, presumably so he could get home to perpetuate some Italian stereotypes, like eating spaghetti and extorting bribes. Another was that he kept forgetting whether his ship was set to "automatic" or "manual," which is semi-important when you need to make some tricky maneuvers in a hugeass supertanker. And finally, he appointed the ship's cook as his helmsman.

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"The captain is on the starboard side, and I'm drunk on the port."

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Shockingly, all of this coagulated into a blitzkrieg of stupid that landed the Torrey Canyon smack dab in the middle of the Seven Stones, a ridiculously famous reef off the coast of Cornwall.

And ... crash.