SS Esso Maracaibo
ship built in 1959
Esso Maracaibo was a tanker of the Creole Petroleum Corporation (a subsidiary of Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey). She was the second ship of that enterprise to bear that name, the first one having been USS Narraguagas. Its purpose was to transport crude oil between Lake Maracaibo and Aruba. It made international headlines on 6 April 1964, when it rammed the General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge, causing two spans of it to collapse.
Construction
Esso Maracaibo was one of four tankers built in 1959 for the Creole Petroleum Corporation at shipyards in Japan. Like her sister Esso Caracas (yard no. 3825), she was built at the Hitachi Zosen shipyard in Innoshima where she was launched on 23 February 1959. Two other ships of the same class, Esso Amuay and Esso Caripito, were built by Mitsui Shipbuilding & Engineering. At 24,727 GRT, with 30 tanks, built along classic lines with bulbous bow, bridge and officer's quarters located amidships, and engines, crew quarters and aft deckhouse located toward the stern, those oil tankers were typical in both size and design for their time. They were equipped with modern navigational devices, radar and sonar, and air conditioning for the crew quarters.
“SS Esso Maracaibo” enters the record as ship built in 1959. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Esso, Maracaibo and ship can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“SS Esso Maracaibo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Esso, Maracaibo and ship provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 15, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5840551. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1964 and 1959.
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This entry incorporates text from “SS Esso Maracaibo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.