Bookable
Oil tanks under attack
On 19 February 1942, 188 Japanese aircraft attacked Darwin in the first of two raids that day, and at least 236 people were killed. In that raid and in later raids on 16 March and 16 June 1942, seven of the eleven above-ground oil tanks on Stokes Hill, above the harbour, were destroyed.
Safe oil storage
The answer was to keep fuel underground. Work on the secret Safe Naval Oil Storage began in 1943, with the engineer George Fisher in charge and about 400 men of the Civil Constructional Corps. They dug into the cliffs below the town with picks, shovels and pneumatic tools, then lined the tunnels with concrete and steel. Each storage tunnel is about 4.5 metres wide and 5.4 metres high.
Never used as planned
Water kept seeping in, and by the time the work was done the danger of bombing had passed: the tunnels never held oil during the war. In the 1950s Tunnels 5 and 6 stored jet fuel for about three years. They opened to the public on 19 February 1992, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin, and were reopened with new interpretive signs on 20 May 2015.
