Just watched Gavin Porter, Di Ford & Naomi Chiffi's Sea Empress film and remember the smell of the oil on the wind flowing over the mountain and being able to smell it in Ceredigion. What a lovely put together film. Good to capture these memories.

It invoked memories of that era. Ann and I had been working on environmental, ecological theatre for about 16 years at that time in 1996 so we put an artist response together to it, harnessing the outrage and anger that the huge scale destruction the spill caused in a performance piece using poetry and puppetry. The community response to the spill was fiery and as volatile as the polluted air.

The piece was titled Bankers in Tankers but with early co-creating instincts engaged with audiences the performance included references to Wankers in Tankers.

There was a small backlash, not for using Wankers in the performance piece but from the port workers fearing for their jobs. In those days we had no phones that could take videos and we were too engaged performing it to get it filmed.

So now with the commitment to transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables how will Milford respond to the challenge?

Will the thousands of green jobs materialize that are needed to respond to the inevitable closing of the oil port, the petrol cracking plant, bitumen industry and gas terminal based there ? Milford Haven is a valuable west facing deep port (except for a few tricky rocks) Will the new fleet of huge multi masted cargo sailing boats be launched from there in years to come? Will the solar collecting sails be manufactured in Wales at all?

At the moment as soon as many big ships and ferries get 12 miles out you can see the diesel fuel change over to heavy oil as pillars of dirty black smoke billow out in the first hundred yards of international waters just over the horizon.

Creative thinking is needed now, well it was needed 40 years ago but there you go big industry was and still is great at not listening.

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