I named a faction of angry, covertly hidden anticapitalist labor unionists in my setting after the Esso Northumbria, a real boat that existed. It was made to carry crude oil from the Persian Gulf, because of the Suez Crisis, in which the Suez Canal was closed.
The Northumbria was not fit for purpose; they just took a smaller ship design and scaled it up like they grabbed an anchor point in the corner and dragged while holding shift. The resultant ship was very, very impressively big, but also very expensive to make. It was a monster, it was proper fucking enormous: it was 348 meters long, three football pitches long. It was also made when Britain was suffering from inflation, and that meant they made this giant boat as cheaply as they could, and cut corners everywhere. So it was cheaply produced, a net loss on investment, and as you might not be surprised when talking about scaling up a metal object, didn't work.
The Northumbria never properly had a 'disaster' spill. It just had lots and lots of minor leaks and spills and constantly needed repair and maintenance. It had just... little failures. Little breakages, which for an enormous machine like this meant thousands and thousands of pounds in repairs every time. It wasn't a matter of if the Northumbria was going to cause an enormous disaster but when. It lasted from 1969 to 1982, whereupon it was taken to Taiwan and dismantled for scrap.
When the Dreadnoughts wrote Roll Northumbria, they imagined a history in which they did have a catastrophic failure, but it was just a detail on the timeline. The thing the whole song carries is the heavy, miserable consideration that the Empire the workers are striving to serve in the song is the thing that is itself, cracking apart and failing, and part of how it's failing is trying to address a problem with a tool unfit for purpose because they think they can buy a success in the middle east quickly and conveniently.
(got all this more or less from wikipedia)