Exxon: Pouring Oil on Trouble Waters -- Part 2

December 13, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters -- Part 2
-AKA-
"The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez"

By: Captain Heavyfoot
[With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot :-)]

The legend lives on from the fishers on down,
Of the Big Sound 'twas made in Prince William.
The ocean, it's said, was their butter and bread,
But oil tar on the sandwich just killed 'em.

Tanks topped with black crude, and with vodka home-brewed,
The famed Exxon-Valdez was quite loaded.
The Captain was too, yet silent his crew,
When they poured both the Captain and cargo aboard her.

Captain Hazelwood had been drinking at two separate bars or more prior to their scheduled departure. There was sworn testimony that he had consumed at least five double-vodkas (enough to knock out anyone who wasn't an alcoholic). He didn't get even a breathalzyer test until 11 hours after the accident, but working backwards from the booze in his blood at that time they calculated that at the time of the accident he was three times the legal limit for driving a car.

Indeed, he wasn't licensed to drive a car ... his license had been suspended for (yet another) DUI. He had completed a rehab program three or four years before the accident and had wracked up three or four DUIs in that period of time! Not only were his superiors aware that he had badly relapsed, but they had actually been drinking with him not long before the accident!

In any event, shortly after the Exxon Valdez pulled away from the dock at 9:12 p.m. and having successfully passed through the Valdez Narrows, the master pilot who was specially hired for such tasks, left the ship. It was a beautiful evening on the water. The seas were calm, visibility was good and the ship had all the latest and most sophisticated of navigation equipment. The official story was that there were icebergs in the normal shipping lanes, so Captain Hazelwood instructed the man at the wheel to take the ship slightly outside the shipping lanes and around the ice. Experts agreed however that such story simply didn't hold together -- they were too far off course with too many ways, both through equipment and visual observation, to not be able to tell.

In fact, it was apparent that they weren't just skirting an iceberg or two, but indeed, whether to avoid icebergs or to make up lost time, or just to shorten the voyage, they almost certainly attempted to follow the old steamship passage and "shoot the gap" between Bligh Reef and Reef Island. This is an incredibly dangerous maneuver for a ship the size of an oil tanker. Authorities at the time likened it to flying under the Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, it can be done. Yes, it has been done before. But it is dangerous and absolutely not recommended nor approved. (There were rumors that for years tankers had snuck through there on occasion but no one had ever actually caught them at it. It was universally agreed, however, that such would be a stupid and dangerous maneuver.) Even so, at that point, Hazelwood then left the bridge in the control of a third mate and was down in his cabin "doing paperwork" through this trickiest part of the passage.

Neither Exxon nor Hazelwood ever admitted that was what they were attempting. The normal shipping lanes out there are extremely wide, deep and forgiving. Anyone could drive a tanker through that part of the journey. But they were over a mile and a half outside the shipping lanes and just barely missed the shortcut gap. Either they were horrendously screwed up (to be a mile and a half off course) which makes no sense, or that is exactly what they were trying.

The poor crewman left at the wheel didn't know what to do. Indeed Third Mate Gregory Cousins was not even certified to operate a ship in PWS and, indeed, it was flatly illegal for him to be at the wheel. (Of course it was also illegal for Hazelwood to be drunk!) It was widely reported at the time although such reports dropped out of sight quickly, that Hazelwood had put the ship on autopilot and instructed Cousins to contact him when they reached a certain point. Despite the fact that this was known as a treacherous area for large vessels; and that they were operating outside the normal shipping lanes, there were no guide boats or tugs and purportedly no one but a rudimentary computer was directing the massive ship. No one who wasn't there knows for sure what actually happened that night. There were also reports that a drunk Hazelwood had made his way back to the bridge and ordered a "hard right" when he should have ordered a "hard left". That isn't the official story either, but the micro-computer in the auto pilot was at least sober and probably would have been the preferred option to the drunk captain. Even so, "computer" is too fancy of a concept for it. The computer you are using to read this article is hundreds of times more intelligent.

If true, one of the largest a 211,500 ton, 988 foot long, fully loaded oil tanker was being controlled by a machine with the approximate I.Q. of a fancy toaster.

And it went crunch.

It shuddered to a halt, engines still running full bore driving it further into the "sandbar" as Exxon likes to call the rocks of the well-charted Bligh Reef that ripped the thin single hull like a sardine can. In the version of the story where he hadn't already made it to the bridge yelling "hard right", Hazelwood stumbled to the bridge, uttered a few choice words, and then tried "rocking" the huge vessel off the rocks by jamming it full throttle forward, full throttle reverse, as you might try to drive you car out of a mudhole. Unlike your car and the mudhole, however, these manuevers acted to rip the holes in the hull much wider and allow much more oil to escape than would have otherwise. Finally, after failing to dislodge it and after the crew inspected things, he slurred into the radio that they had "fetched up" on a reef and were "evidently leaking" some of their cargo.

Truer understatements were seldom more understated.

The "little bit" of "cargo" that leaked was nearly 11 million gallons of tarry black Alaskan crude oil. It fouled 1300 miles of mostly pristine Alaska shoreline and covered 11,000 square feet of ocean.

Although there is a minor error or two, this is an excellent dynamic one-page pictoral "overview" of PWS and the spill.

Part 3 of This Series May be Viewed Here: