-An oil tanker ran aground today off the nation’s northernmost ice-free port,
Valdez, Alaska.
One of the worst oil spills in U.S. history brought Americans images
of blackened beaches, dying wildlife, outrage and betrayal.
-The evidence is that the response was slow and inadequate.
Blame soon centered on the tanker captain.
-It is now clear that the captain of the tanker, who was not on the
bridge at the time of the accident, had been drinking.
But the accident also exposed the inattention to oil industry safety, and
led to promises to repair the damage that had been done. . .
-We will consider whatever it takes to keep you whole.
. . .and to do more to stop future spills.
-We also rededicate ourselves to transportation safety and to realistic
planning for accidents that do occur.
Decades later, what happened to the promises made in the
wake of the Exxon Valdez?
-The Gulf spill might already be as much as three times worse than the
Exxon Valdez disaster.
Just past midnight on March 24, the supertanker Exxon Valdez crashed
into a reef off the coast of southern Alaska.
-One of America’s most magnificent waterways is blackened and
befouled tonight by the biggest oil spill in American history.
-240,000 barrels – 11 million gallons – of Alaskan crude oil
escaped from the huge vessel.
The oil industry’s response plans had promised a swift cleanup
in the event of a spill.
But Riki Ott was alarmed when she flew over the wreck.
-We’re nine hours after the wreck and there was not a speck of
promised recovery equipment on the water.
This had all been promised within six hours and we
were three hours past six hours, and nothing.
Neither Exxon nor Alyeska, the oil pipeline company in charge of the
immediate response, was ready for such a large spill.
-Alyeska was supposed to have an emergency response team at its
terminal in Valdez, but eight years ago, the team was disbanded.
-The response vessels were either under snow or were being repaired.
They were completely overwhelmed.
Coast Guard didn’t quite know what to do.
-Equipment to fight the spill has to be flown in from as far away as
Texas and England.
-Exxon says it’s using all available resources, but it argues the spill is
simply too big to surround with booms and skim it up.
As images of the spill appeared on the evening news, Exxon began
limited tests of chemical dispersants to try to
break up the oil.
The dispersants were controversial, and it was unclear if
they would work or cause even more harm.
-The chemicals you use to cause the oil to sink is very dangerous to
marine life, and we have to be certain that we cause a minimal
amount of damage.
But it was soon too late to matter.
-Winds up to 70 miles an hour virtually shut down the oil spill
cleanup operation this morning.
-The storm had come up and the oil was moving,
and almost nothing could be done.
-Some crews are literally on their knees, using absorbent towels
to remove the oil from rocky beaches.
Less than 15 percent of the oil was recovered.
News cameras captured the damage…
-Eight hundred miles of shoreline already covered with oil.
…and the anger.
-This should have been the easiest spill in the world to clean up.
-Growing questions about how future disasters of this kind can be
prevented, and why there was such a slow response to this spill.
At the same time, another storyline was taking hold.
-The Exxon spokesperson says – There might have been a problem
with Captain Hazelwood, it seems he had a bit of a drinking problem.
-Good evening. The captain was drinking, the captain has been fired.
That is the sum of it from Alaska tonight.
-The story became Hazelwood.
-Top 10 excuses of the Exxon tanker captain.
Number 10: Was trying to scrape ice off reef for margarita.
-That’s a sensational kind of story.
You have an immediate assignment of responsibility, an immediate villain.
What was lost in all of that was the company’s responsibility.
When a pipeline to bring oil from northern Alaska to Valdez was
approved back in 1973, the oil industry and the federal
government promised to make safety a priority.
The government initially supported double-hulled tankers
and a high tech navigation system in Valdez.
-We were given blanket assurances about safety and spills.
In retrospect, I erred in not making
sure that, almost, that what was said was not put in writing.
Those promises never materialized,
and when the state of Alaska passed its own safety law,
the oil industry sued,
saying the law infringed on federal authority.
-The court threw out the state’s plan.
So, no double-hulled tankers, much more freedom to determine
where the navigation channel would be.
When the pipeline first opened, tankers were closely monitored by
the Coast Guard and stayed in the shipping lanes, even when they
were clogged with ice floes.
-Instead of diverting out of the channel,
they were supposed to slow down.
But by the time the Exxon Valdez left port, the Coast Guard routinely
allowed ships to leave the channel
to avoid the increasing amount of ice.
-Slowing down was not something they want to do because
time is money.
A few minutes after that message, the Coast Guard wasn’t monitoring
the Valdez on its radar.
-The Coast Guard is supposed to be the check in case the ship
makes a mistake.
And they weren’t,
they weren’t watching the ship.
Captain Hazelwood turned the bridge over to Third Mate
Gregory Cousins and went to his quarters
after giving instructions to maneuver around the ice.
-Did you have any concerns about, uh, getting past the ice?
-Not at that time, not at that instant. No.
-Cousins continued going south, heading directly into Bligh Reef.
A federal investigation later found that Cousins lost track of the ship’s
location and didn’t turn back in time.
It found that reduced tanker crews probably left Cousins overworked
and tired, contributing to the accident, a conclusion Cousins and
Exxon disputed.
The investigation faulted Hazelwood for leaving the
bridge, and said his judgment was impaired by alcohol.
Hazelwood denied he was drunk, and was later
acquitted of criminal charges related to drinking.
-Did they have some fault? Yes.
But the real fault was, there wasn’t the safety net.
Exxon spent more than $2 billion cleaning up the spill
and says there was no long-term environmental damage.
But pockets of oil were found beneath the surface of some
beaches as of 2018, and remain a concern.
-Prince William Sound is not the same as it was.
The environment still has not fully recovered.
Exxon paid $300 million to those hurt by the spill, and a jury later
awarded another $5 billion in punitive damages.
Exxon appealed, delaying the case for 14 years, and
leaving lasting bitterness in Alaska.
-4,000 of the original plaintiffs have died since the Exxon Valdez.
In 2008, the Supreme Court cut punitive
damages to a tenth of the original amount.
After the spill, millions of federal dollars were designated for cleanup
research, and Congress required better contingency planning,
double-hulled tankers and tugboat escorts in Prince William Sound.
-We were now making traffic out of Valdez probably the safest line of
passage anywhere in the globe.
-The explosion happened at the Deepwater Horizon rig
Tuesday night.
-Now everyone is hoping and praying that the Gulf of Mexico rig
doesn’t turn into an environmental disaster.
-The Coast Guard has called off the search for the 11 missing workers.
After an explosion on an oil rig owned by BP in 2010, a presidential
commission found that many lessons of the Exxon Valdez
had been forgotten in the pursuit of offshore oil drilling.
-I used the phrase that the offense got way ahead of the defense.
The potential risks had increased dramatically,
but there’d been no commensurate increase in our
capability to avoid an accident or to respond to it.
It found that the major oil companies had made only a
minimal investment in new response technology,
and the government had spent less than
half the authorized amount on cleanup research.
-The emphasis is always on preventing these things from
occurring because when they happen, we’re not very well
equipped to deal with them.
The news was again filled with an oil company struggling to contain an
87-day spill 12 times larger than the Exxon Valdez, using much of the
same crude cleanup technology from the 1980s.
-We’re still relying on booms, still relying on skimmers,
still relying on shovels.
The government authorized BP to use nearly two million gallons of
dispersants, whose environmental impact continues to be debated.
-The key question that scientists are trying to figure out is whether oil
dispersants in the deep ocean do more harm than good.
The commission also found that while tanker safety improved after
the Valdez, the oil industry resisted new offshore drilling safety rules.
-It was reflective of a culture in the offshore oil industry.
We ended up 20 years after Exxon Valdez with an
even more serious incident, but no better prepared
to avoid it or deal with it.
After the spill, BP paid more than $20 billion in penalties,
and the Obama administration toughened safety requirements for offshore drilling,
some of which were later eased by the Trump administration.
It’s a pattern of unsettled standards and oversight
that environmentalists say raises questions about the industry’s
preparedness for oil spills of the future.
-I think the fundamental lesson is, can you sustain the commitment
and the effort that was so intense immediately after the event to
develop a constantly evolving science of safety and response?