The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Paradise Lost
IT’S 4:30 a.m. when my ride to Bligh Reef, the supertanker Arco Prudhoe Bay, slips serenely from the port of Valdez, Alaska, her belly freshly gorged with 50,000 tons of hot crude oil from the North Slope. There has been a slight addition to normal sailing orders, says Captain Justin C. Raymond, a former lobsterman from Nahant, Massachusetts: “Keep her off the rocks, Dad,” his fifteen-year-old son has urged him. Raymond’s son has been taking flak from schoolmates since another tanker captain, Joseph Hazelwood, crunched the Exxon Valdez head onto the reef during a similar transit through Prince William Sound in March, nearly a month ago now. “I’ve tried every way I can since then to imagine how they did it,” says Raymond. “It was just insane.”
The captain, wearing jeans, Nikes and a parka, sips coffee at the big glass windows of the bridge. Dawn is slopping over the snowy peaks of the Chugach Range, which walls our passage on both sides. From the airy, spacious bridge, done in light browns and cool creams, the scenery, not the tanker, seems to be moving. Only the merest shudder betrays the workings several decks below us of 20,000-horsepower engines, chuffing along at a lazy eighty revolutions per minute, turning a propeller roughly the height of a two-story house. Commanding all this is the most disappointing steering wheel, a black metal disk about eighteen inches in diameter (hydraulics have replaced the big, polished wood and brass affairs, which would, for a supertanker, have to be about thirty feet high to afford sufficient mechanical leverage on the mammoth rudder). All in all, the ambience is more insurance-company office than salty fo’c’sle; Metropolitan Life, not Tugboat Annie. There is no sense, here in the calm of Prince William Sound, that we are riding a potent reservoir of toxic cargo that, for all its impressive propulsion and guidance systems, is only marginally maneuverable.
Anticipation is all, in driving one of these babies. For example, our bow, sticking out there farther from us than Bo Jackson’s longest homer, is pointed dead on for a granite slab of Chugach mountain. Not to worry; Jim Wright, one of the local pilots every tanker must carry out of Valdez, called out a course change to the able-bodied seaman at the helm nearly a minute ago. It will be another half a minute or so before we can see the bow of the Prudhoe Bay, 662 feet distant, clearly responding and yet another minute before the AB calls out that she has steadied on the new heading.
A plaque on the port side of the bridge details the results of the Prudhoe Bay‘s latest deceleration trials, which demonstrate what happens when she loses power while underway. Running at full sea speed, about fifteen knots, her engines were thrown into idle. Forty-five minutes later, having traveled 7.4 nautical miles, she was still plowing along smartly at more than four knots. Full speed astern to slow her, says Raymond, is a good command in the movies, but of scant utility in real life. It only causes the huge prop to “walk” a supertanker’s stern around, sending her careering uncontrollably. “Strictly a desperation move,” he says. “The only way to bleed off speed is a series of hard turns.”
It’s 7:00 a.m., and we have cleared the Valdez Narrows, a pinched passage through the mountains where tankers are restricted to six knots. Captain Raymond is kidding Pilot Wright that it has just taken the latter fifty-two seconds to visit the head. “Some expert” from the California Maritime Academy, says Raymond, has been timing people recently, just a small example of the almost frenzied theorizing that is going on to explain why Captain Hazelwood disappeared from the bridge of the Valdez not long before she foundered on the rocks. “You should have been able to do it in forty-four seconds,” says Raymond. “Well, I wash my hands after,” says the pilot. “Better with the old ships . . . you just pissed on the deck,” says the captain.
How did the Exxon Valdez wander from a shipping lane so wide that a United States Coast Guard admiral would later say, with only mild hyperbole, that “your children could drive a tanker through it”? As we near the rocky underwater promontory that was the Exxon Valdez‘s downfall, the mystery seems only to deepen. These ships have so many navigation systems: Besides twin radars, there is Loran C, a sophisticated triangulation system that uses shore-based signal towers to direct a boat to within several meters of any spot it has been, even in open water. A separate system, SATNAV, which relies on satellite signals, does much the same as Loran C. Then there is the Collision Avoidance System, CAS II, basically a minicomputer with a screen that gives clear and detailed visual information of the ship’s speed, course in tenths of degrees, closest point of approach to other objects and time of arrival at any point on the screen.
There is more technology to see, but an old navigation phrase, the lowest of low tech, has been running through my mind ever since we left Valdez: RED RIGHT TURNING. My father drilled it into my head when I was twelve, running a fifteen-foot skiff with ten-horsepower outboard around the shallows of my native Chesapeake Bay. RED RIGHT RETURNING: Always keep the red channel markers and red buoys on your right when returning to a port or harbor, and conversely, keep them on your left when you are leaving. RED RIGHT RETURNING. It’s information good for getting in and out of any established navigational channel in America, and much of the world. The way in and out of Valdez is no exception. Virtually all but the most casual pleasure boaters know the RRR dictum. It certainly must have been known to the crew on the bridge of the Exxon Valdez that fateful morning, a few minutes after midnight, March 24th, 1989, when they apparently ignored it, to the everlasting regret of us all.
It was a fine night for sailing, calm and clear, when the Exxon Valdez, the 987-foot flagship of the giant oil company’s navy, sailed at nine. Fishermen around Valdez would recall afterward that the northern lights that week had been unusually active, flaring a rarely seen reddish orange, and maybe it was an omen. Thursday night, even as the ship left port, the people of Valdez were meeting to form a committee to deal with the impact of oil transport on the area, and Riki Ott, representing one of the fishing organizations on Prince William Sound, testified that a major spill was “a question of when, not if,” but she was known for being outspoken.
Joe Hazelwood may or may not have been drunk at the wheel. He has been fired by Exxon and is charged with three misdemeanor and three felony violations, carrying a maximum sentence of five years and $50,000. He is not talking to investigators. We know secondhand his step-by-step movements ashore during most of the preceding day — shopping for Easter flowers to be sent to his family in New York State, ordering pizza, drinking what appeared to be vodka, playing darts at the Pipeline Club, a popular tanker men’s spot. After returning to the ship, he had two nonalcoholic Moussy beers, he told a Coast Guard officer who arrived on board soon after the grounding. Not until nine hours after the accident was the captain tested for blood alcohol. He was found to be legally drunk — but by then, who in his place wouldn’t have been?
Hazelwood’s actions that night, according to witnesses at government hearings and interviews with crew members, were strange at the least and violated accepted tanker practices. He left the bridge during the critical passage through the Valdez Narrows; left it again after ordering a course change to avoid small icebergs that set the ship on a line straight for Bligh Reef. He also turned the bridge over to Gregory Cousins, his third mate, who was not licensed by the Coast Guard to pilot the ship in these confined waters. For all that, it appears likely Hazelwood would have gotten away with it had Cousins followed the captain’s orders — or just kept on the proper side of a clearly visible red light.
The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Paradise Lost, Page 1 of 17