Following the recent major oil spill in Mauritius, when the Panamanian-flagged ship Wakashio grounded, Reuters gathered in a list major oil spills that took place through the years.
The list goes as follows:
| 1978 | The Amoco Cadiz oil tanker ran aground off the coast of Brittany, France, after its steering failed in a severe storm. This incident led to the spilling of 1.8 million barrels of oil. |
| 1979 | The Atlantic Empress and the Aegean Captain, two fully loaded oil tankers, collided 10 miles (16.1 kms) off the coast of Tobago in a tropical rainstorm, spilling more than 2.1 million barrels of oil into the Caribbean. |
| 1983 | The Castillo de Bellver exploded and sank off the coast of Cape Town carrying roughly 250,000 tonnes of crude oil. |
| 1988 | The fully loaded tanker Odyssey exploded and sank in the North Atlantic 700 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, spilling 1 million barrels of oil. |
| 1989 | The Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker bound for Long Beach, California, hit Prince William Sound in Alaska, dumping more than 250,000 barrels of crude oil into the sea killing animals and plants throughout Prince William Sound. |
| 1991 | The oil tanker ABT Summer exploded about 900 miles off the coast of Angola, spilling its entire cargo of 1.9 million barrels at sea. |
| 1996 | The Sea Empress went down on the rocks off Milford Haven on Britain’s west coast in 1996, in one of the country’s worst environmental disasters that saw over 70,000 tonnes of oil spilled. |
| 1999 | The tanker Erika sank during a storm in December, leaking thousands of tonnes of oil into the Bay of Biscay off the coast of France and causing a major environmental disaster. |
| 2011/2012 | In New Zealand, hundreds of tonnes of oil leaked into the coastal waters and on to beaches off Tauranga on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island from the stricken 47,230-tonne Liberian-flagged container ship Rena. |
| 2018 | The suezmax Sanchi tanker carrying 136,000 tonnes of Iranian condensate collided with a cargo ship off Shanghai, caught fire and burned for a week. All 32 crew onboard were killed. Japan’s Coast Guard said at the time that oil which washed up on the shores of its southern islands was highly likely to have come from Sanchi. |
| 2020 | The Wakashio, a Japanese bulk carrier, struck a coral reef off Mauritius’ coast in the Indian Ocean in July, spilling thousands of tonnes of crude oil into the sea and choking marine life in a pristine lagoon. |
| 2020 | The New Diamond supertanker carrying about 2 million barrels of oil caught fire off the coast of Sri Lanka in September with one of the 23 crew members presumed dead. |
