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Esso Northumbria

British crude oil tanker

Field	Value
display_title	ital
section1	{{Infobox ship/image
section2	{{Infobox ship/career
country	United Kingdom
flag
name	Esso Northumbria
owner	Esso
registry	London
builder	Swan Hunter, Wallsend
launched	2 May 1969
sponsor	Princess Anne
completed	14 May 1970
identification	*
*Call sign: GZJE<ref name	"shipspotting"
nickname	"Big Geordie"
fate	Scrapped in Taiwan in 1982
section3	{{Infobox ship/characteristics
type	Oil tanker
tonnage	*
*<ref name	"shipspotting"/
length	*348.5 m o/a
* p/p<ref name	"aukevisser"/
beam	51.9 m
depth	25.6 m
propulsion	2 × Associated Electrical Industries steam turbines, 32000 shp, single screw
speed	16 kn

Call sign: GZJE
330.7 m p/p

History

Esso Northumbria was the first of a series of Very Large Crude Carrier ships, built by Swan Hunter at Wallsend on Tyneside, in 1969. When launched on 2 May 1969 by Princess Anne it was the largest vessel to have been built in the United Kingdom at the time.

The ship was designed to carry crude oil from the Persian Gulf, and its large design was a result of the Six Day War, which had resulted in the closing of the Suez Canal. The ship was single-hulled and was designed with relatively limited knowledge of the behaviours of such large structures at sea, being generally a straightforward scaling-up of smaller tanker designs. It was also built to a fixed-price contract at a time when rampant inflation was occurring in Britain. This led to many attempts to cut costs; Swan Hunter ultimately made a loss on the contract. Final cost of the ship's construction were £6.5 million.

The Northumbria was plagued with problems both with its fittings and also, more seriously, with cracking of its hull under stress. The ship needed many repairs throughout its short working lifetime and this, together with fears of a major oil spill, prompted its retirement in 1982 after only 12 years in service. The ship was sailed on its final voyage to Taiwan, where it was broken up for scrap at Kaohsiung. A similar fate befell the Northumbria's sister ship, Esso Hibernia, which was also built on Tyneside and launched in 1970.

In popular culture

The launching of the Northumbria was a major local media event at the time. In 2019, the Canadian folk band The Dreadnoughts released a song called Roll Northumbria, dedicated to the ship which describes an exaggerated account of the Northumbria's short and unfortunate service.

References

(2012). "Esso Northumbria". Tyne Built Ships & Shipbuilders.
Visser, Auke. (2012). "Esso Northumbria (1970-1982)". aukevisser.nl.
(2012). "ESSO NORTHUMBRIA". shipspotting.com.
(2012). "Tyne-built ships which sailed to stardom". thefreelibrary.com.
(3 May 1969). "Large Ship Launched by Princess". The Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
"Esso Hibernia".
"The launch of the Esso Northumbria in May, 1969".
The Dreadnoughts. "Roll Northumbria".

Info: Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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