Getting wrecked in Shetland

JANUARY 1993: THE BRAER DISASTER

It started with a kiss... a pucker, a catspaw of warm wind against cool, somewhere on a line between New York and the Azores. Soon, soughs of new air would curtsy, then dart, then rush in to take the place of the warm thermals now twisting slowly clockwise towards the sky.

Within minutes the first sounds would be heard; the crack and sigh of two great invisible sails, the cold and the hot, slapping and buffeting, twisting for advantage, growing angrier with each defeat, calling back to the Pole and to the Tropics for reinforcements. Within hours a raging battle had been joined and the vortex began to spin east along the Polar Frontal Jet, growing mightier with each mile.

Only in the Tropics, with Latin sentiment, do the great winds get names. Somewhat prosaically, the men at Aberdeen Weather Centre named this howling beast Depression A, as first it showed up on their screens around lunchtime on January 4. Four days later they would pinpoint another wee twister, beginning a bit further north, again springing from nowhere, feet above the gunmetal sea. This baby they called Depression E.

Between them, the two storms served up a double-punch that Shetland, and the world, should never forget. They were there to teach us humility. What do we care, they said, for your pygmy articles and conventions, your egos, and greed and cost-cutting? what do we care for your press releases and bogus reassurances, your insistence that humanity, and its tools, can compete with nature? For watch! We have thrown a boat at you, 173,000 tonnes served up with a lazy flick. Look! We have broken it apart, burst its innards over you. And see! We have cleaned it up for you, washed white your beaches. Given you a second chance. Given you time to think.

Whether we take such a chance depends, to a frankly unfair degree, on the strength of character of 22,700 people, the inhabitants of the Shetland Isles. For them, two battles are only just beginning - to survive the economic and, to a large extent, physiological sea-changes that threaten them, and to ensure it can never happen again.

In both battles they will be substantially on their own. The media are away, the experts on their way home, the politicians long gone. Already it's being dubbed the disaster that never happened, to the delight of the culpable, who are hoping that apathy, boredom, the lack of any one truly apocalyptic image from the thousands of photographs taken and the remoteness of Shetland will combine over the next few months to ensure, essentially, that they get away with it.

Shetland has signalled that this will not be allowed to happen. If they play it smart, they will turn the passage of time to their advantage not letting distance obscure the issues but rather using it to dissect, to analyse, to find answers for the future. Already, a few weeks after the arrival of the Braer, hindsight gives us shafts of understanding denied to those who had to bluff, shout and react their way through the first dramatic week. The passage of time has not reduced the drama, but heightened it. There's still plenty to tell. Plenty of passion. Plenty of heroes. And plenty of villains ...
Forget those oil-slick blues, put on your dancing shoes ... and come along to JJ's tonight. By Saturday, January 8 the disco's radio ads were skipping out via the Shetland Islands Broadcasting Co, SIBC for short, known for some reason in the islands as SHIT.

Later that day, Magnus Magnusson, in a well-meaning but ill-judged PR exercise, was to tell a press conference that there had been no disaster. "It's a bad accident, but not a disaster, not a catastrophe." There were, at that stage, more journalists on the islands - 570 at the height - than there were dead birds. The first otter to die after the spill had, it later emerged, been run over by a Norwegian TV crew.

So was it a disaster? No, it wasn't; 85,000 tonnes of highly toxic crude spilling over some of the most beautiful islands in the world is actually best described as a musical comedy. Of course it was a disaster, despite the semantic arguments that followed for weeks afterwards. "I've only three words to say about Magnus Magnusson," said an airport worker that night, sniffing the oily spray still lashing Sumburgh Head. "Two of them are Magnus Magnusson."

There may have been some people willing it to be a more obvious disaster. Photographers. Benetton. The wilder-eyed groups of environmental Schutz-Staffel (Four fins good! Two legs bad!) But, though the cataclysmic images refused to appear, the grounding of the Braer will continue to be a huge body-blow to the Shetland system.