The Record
Single-hulled oil tanker, running Valdez to Long Beach. Ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound at 00:04 on 24 March 1989 after leaving the charted lane to avoid ice; Captain Hazelwood was not on the bridge. 11 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude spilled across 2,100 kilometres of Alaskan coastline. No crew died; the otters, orcas, and herring fisheries did, and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 mandated double hulls on every tanker entering U.S. waters.
The Vessel
The Exxon Valdez was a single-hulled supertanker of 987 feet (300 metres), 214,861 deadweight tons, built at the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company in San Diego and delivered to Exxon Shipping Company in December 1986. She was the third of a planned class of five purpose-built Trans-Alaska Pipeline Service (TAPS) tankers, designed to load at the Valdez, Alaska terminal and deliver North Slope crude oil to American Pacific and Gulf Coast refineries. The class had been contracted under the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, which required American-flag tankers for the North Slope trade.
She carried crude oil in fifteen cargo tanks. Her hull was a single skin of mild steel; the inner bottom structure, typical of American-built tankers of her generation, was the principal barrier between her cargo and the sea. Her emergency protection against grounding relied on her cargo-tank subdivision and on the operational avoidance of grounding hazards, rather than on a second independent hull.
Her captain in March 1989 was Joseph Hazelwood, 42, a 20-year Exxon Shipping veteran who had commanded the Exxon Chester, the Exxon Houston, and the Exxon New York before taking the Exxon Valdez on her first Alaska assignment in February 1987. Hazelwood had been treated for alcohol dependency between 1984 and 1986 under Exxon's employee assistance programme; he had been medically cleared to resume command duties in 1986 subject to continued outpatient treatment. His post-rehabilitation record was unremarkable; he had passed all subsequent crew-performance evaluations.
Her voyage of 22-23 March 1989 was her thirtieth Alaska run. She loaded approximately 53.1 million US gallons of Alaska North Slope crude at the Valdez Marine Terminal on 22 March 1989 and departed the terminal at 21:12.
The Voyage
The Exxon Valdez began her outbound transit of Prince William Sound with a licensed harbour pilot aboard. The pilot debarked at the Naked Island pilot station at approximately 23:24; from that point, the vessel was under the command of her master, Captain Hazelwood, and was to proceed along the outbound shipping lane of the Valdez Arm.
At approximately 23:39, while communicating with the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service Valdez, Captain Hazelwood requested and received permission to deviate from the outbound shipping lane to avoid ice from the Columbia Glacier. The deviation, authorised by the VTS on a routine basis because glacial ice was a common seasonal hazard, placed the tanker on a southwesterly course that would take her through the inbound shipping lane and then close to Bligh Reef, a charted hazard at the southern end of the Valdez Arm.
Captain Hazelwood left the bridge at approximately 23:50 to attend to paperwork in his cabin. He placed the Third Mate, Gregory Cousins, in charge of the bridge during the manoeuvre that would return the tanker to her outbound lane. Cousins was not certified to navigate the Valdez Arm and the Coast Guard regulations required the Master's direct supervision of the navigation in that area. The handover was a direct violation of those regulations.
Cousins calculated a turn to starboard that would return the tanker to her outbound lane before she reached Bligh Reef. The calculation was incorrect. At 00:04 on 24 March 1989 the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef at a speed of 12 knots.
The Disaster
The grounding opened eight of her fifteen cargo tanks. Crude oil began leaking from the opened tanks at a rate that exceeded the ability of her emergency pumping systems to counter. Over the following two days, despite immediate response by her crew, by Alyeska Pipeline Service Company (the consortium operating the Valdez terminal), by the Exxon Shipping Company, and by the State of Alaska, approximately 11 million US gallons (260,000 barrels, 42,000 tonnes) of North Slope crude oil were released into Prince William Sound. This was the largest marine oil spill in United States history at the time, and remained so until the Deepwater Horizon release of 2010.
The initial cleanup response was slow. Alyeska's oil-spill response barge, required by the Prince William Sound oil-spill contingency plan to be available within five hours, was out of service with a tarpaulin over her equipment; she did not reach the Exxon Valdez until 14 hours after the grounding. The oil spread with the prevailing currents. Within ten days the slick had covered 1,300 square kilometres; within three weeks, 2,100 kilometres of Alaskan coastline from Prince William Sound to Kodiak Island were contaminated with crude oil.
The wildlife toll was unprecedented in American history: an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 247 bald eagles, 22 orcas, and a generation of Pacific herring. Many of the remaining populations of these species in Prince William Sound have not returned to pre-spill levels in the three decades since. The estimated value of lost commercial fishing in the first decade after the spill was $2.8 billion; commercial fishing seasons for Pacific herring in Prince William Sound were closed in 1992 and have not reopened.
No crew member was injured in the grounding. The tanker remained afloat, though with significant structural damage; she was lightered of her remaining cargo and towed to Port San Luis, California, for temporary repairs in July 1989 and subsequent permanent repair at National Steel and Shipbuilding in San Diego.
The Legacy
Captain Hazelwood was charged in Alaska state court with operating a vessel under the influence of alcohol, reckless endangerment, negligent discharge of oil, and mischief. His blood alcohol level at the time of the grounding was the subject of extensive evidentiary dispute: a blood sample taken nine hours after the grounding showed 0.061%, which would retrospectively place his level at the time of grounding well above 0.08%. The admissibility of the sample was challenged on collection-procedure grounds. In March 1990 Hazelwood was acquitted of the three most serious charges and convicted only of the negligent discharge of oil. His sentence was 1,000 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine, both of which he served.
Exxon Corporation's liability was vastly larger. The company paid approximately $3.8 billion in cleanup costs between 1989 and 1992. In 1991 it settled federal and Alaska state criminal charges for $125 million. The civil litigation from Alaska Native corporations, commercial fishermen, and property owners produced a 1994 Alaska state court verdict of $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon; after two decades of appeal the United States Supreme Court reduced the punitive award to $507.5 million in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker (2008). The total cost of the Exxon Valdez disaster to Exxon Corporation, across criminal, civil, and cleanup liability, is conservatively estimated at $7 billion in 1989 dollars.
The legislative consequences were more enduring. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990, signed into law on 18 August 1990, mandated double-hull construction for all tankers operating in U.S. waters by 2015, established strict-liability for oil spills in American waters, and created the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund from a per-barrel tax on imported crude. The OPA 1990 phase-out of single-hulled tankers was the principal industry-wide consequence of the Exxon Valdez; by 2015, every tanker visiting an American port was double-hulled.
The tanker herself was renamed, reflagged, and continued in service under a succession of owners until 2012, when she was scrapped at Alang, India. The name Exxon Valdez is, by mutual agreement of the shipping industry, retired: no vessel has carried it since 1990. The grounding site at Bligh Reef is unmarked but is maintained in every chart of Prince William Sound as a navigational waypoint. The anniversary of the grounding, 24 March, is marked annually in Alaska as a remembrance day for the spill and its ongoing ecological aftermath.