Interesting, thanks for sharing that OG.
Fairly local to where I used to live, the battleship Royal Oak was sunk in October 1939 by U47, as well as being a war grave she has been leaking bunker fuel oil for years. The navy has had to do something about it as there could have been up to 3000 tons of oil on board and if that all got released into the environment it could be quite a disaster.
Royal Oak sank with up to 3,000 tons of fuel oil aboard, the precise amount being unknown since such records were lost with the ship. Oil leaked from the corroding hull at an increased rate during the 1990s and concerns about the environmental impact led the Ministry of Defence to consider plans for extracting it.[130] Royal Oak's status as a war grave required that surveys and any proposed techniques for removing the oil be handled sensitively: plans in the 1950s to raise and salvage the wreck had been dropped in response to public opposition.[131] In addition to the ethical concerns, poorly managed efforts could destabilise the wreck, resulting in a mass release of the remaining oil;[132] the ship also contains many tons of unexploded ordnance.[133]
The MOD commissioned a series of multi-beam sonar surveys to image the wreck and appraise its condition.[134] The high-resolution sonograms showed Royal Oak to be lying almost upside down with her top works forced into the seabed. The tip of the bow had been blown off by U-47's first torpedo and a gaping hole on the starboard flank was the result of the triple strike from her second successful salvo.[133][135] Following several years of delays, Briggs Marine was contracted by the MoD to conduct the task of pumping off the remaining oil.[136] Royal Oak's mid-construction conversion to fuel oil had placed her fuel tanks in unconventional positions, complicating operations. By 2006, all double bottom tanks had been cleared and the task of removing oil from the inner wing tanks with cold cutting equipment began the next year.[133] By 2010, some 1600 tonnes of fuel oil had been removed, and the wreck was declared to be no longer actively releasing oil into Scapa Flow.[136] Operations continue at a reduced pace to tackle the oil known to be remaining (state for 2012)
