Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, the tanker Exxon Valdez ran hard aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, less than three hours after leaving the Alyeska pipeline terminal at Valdez with some 53 million gallons of North Slope crude oil. Eight of the ship’s eleven cargo tanks ruptured, and roughly 10.8 million gallons of oil poured into one of the richest and most pristine marine environments in North America.
The National Transportation Safety Board found that the ship’s master, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, had been drinking and had left the bridge to an unqualified officer: the third mate, who was not certified to pilot the vessel in those waters, was alone in charge as the tanker left the shipping lanes to avoid ice and failed to return in time. Fatigue, reduced manning and the Coast Guard’s failure to provide an effective vessel traffic system all contributed. Hazelwood was acquitted of the most serious charges and convicted of a misdemeanor, negligent discharge of oil.
The response then failed as completely as the navigation had. The spill contingency plan for the terminal collapsed in the first hours — the dedicated response barge was out of service and much of the containment equipment was buried under snow — and the oil spread across some 1,300 miles of coastline. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds, thousands of sea otters, seals, eagles and whales died, and the Sound’s herring and salmon fisheries were devastated, some for decades.
The Alaska Oil Spill Commission, in its final report Spill: The Wreck of the Exxon Valdez, blamed a system that had grown complacent: the safeguards promised when the trans-Alaska pipeline was approved in the 1970s had been steadily downgraded or ignored, by industry and regulators alike. Congress answered with the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which required double hulls on tankers, created citizen advisory councils in Alaska and raised liability for spills. The litigation ran for nearly two decades; a $5 billion punitive damages award against Exxon was cut by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008 to about $507 million.
Download the Alaska Oil Spill Commission Final Report — Executive Summary (2.2 MB file)
The Commission’s Account of the Accident — Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council