Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Essay Research Paper

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Essay, Research Paper

On March 24, 1989 one of the biggest oil spills in U.S. history occurred. This spill wasso great, it took over two years to clean up. To this day, Prince William Sound is stillsuffering from the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. “On a windless Spring night in 1989, the two worlds of nature and industry collided”(Carr pg. 0). If you were to go fishing off the shores of Blair Island, you mayrun into a gooey black substance, known as crude oil. “March 24, 1989 just west of Blair Island, the Exxon Valdez tanker ran agroundon a well-charted, well-marked reef about twenty-five miles from the Trans-AlaskaPipeline terminal at Valdez, Alaska”(Piper pg. 1). When the T/V Exxon Valdez hit thereef, the water was covered by oil in a matter of minutes. No one knew this because ithappened in the middle of the night, when it was impossible to see the millions ofgallons of crude oil that leaked into the Sound. The actual distance of the oil thatspread is approx. 1200 miles, roughly from New York to Miami. How could an accident of this size happen. You could blame the accident on anumber of things, but one of the main problems was the captain of the vessel; he had aproblem. He had an addiction to alcohol. Before departing, Captain Joseph Hazel hadstopped at a bar and had a few drinks, and drank more after he had departed. Insteadof ending in the inbound lane, he went on through the inbound lane taking the tankerfurther off course. In one transmission, he mistakenly identified the Exxon Valdezvessel as the Exxon Baton Rouge, and his speech was slurred. “The NationalTransportation s Safety Board concluded that the accident was due to a combination ofbad seamanship, bad judgment, bad management and bad luck. The Alaska Oil Spillcommission later expanded the blame in it’s 1990 findings, concluding that industry waspoorly prepared and the public and political leadership had grown dependent on othersbefore the disaster”(NTSB pg. 1). “One of the U.S. Coast Guard’s responsibility’s is to watch and report any accident immediately. They have proper equipment, such as radars to be able to locatean accident such as an oil spill”(Piper pg. 11). The U.S. coast guard could have seenthe accident on the screen as soon as it happened, but no one even saw it that night,because they were not paying attention. One navigator said, ” There could be nopossible confusion”(Piper pg 1). Somebody wasn’t doing what they were getting paidfor. Maybe if someone had noticed that night they could have been quicker aboutgetting the proper equipment, the man power and a solid plan on how they should goabout stopping the spread of the leak, and where to start clean-up. The clean up teamcould have had a head start on the clean up, but nobody noticed the leak, so they hadan extra two million barrels worth of extra work. “It was not long after the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks that the public becameconfused about who was running the response, and why was the spiller taking control. The public had little confidence in the spill response structure that was forming inAlaska”(Piper pg. 12). To the public’s eye, Captain Joseph Hazel and Exxon were theleading blame, and the government was somewhere in the background. Exxon was nota government agency, therefore not responsible to make the decisions. “The CoastGuard was the coordinator of the effort, but Exxon managers, not the Coast Guard, toldworkers where to go and what to do. People were frustrated and few actually knewand/or understood the national spill response system. The response wasn’t runningsmoothly, but the officials who did understand were working with the existingsystem”(Piper pg. 13). “When Exxon entered the picture in the first days of the spill,they did not follow the Alyeska plan, and later said they followed their own. Whateverplan they were following, if any, it was not a state-approved plan,” said DECCommissioner Dennis Kelso(Kelso pg. 15). People made too much of a deal about who was in charge, when the real problem was that they did not have proper equipment to deal with a spill of that size. Who cares whos in charge, if they have nothing to command. People took toomuch time deciding making unimportant decisions, instead of doing something about the spill. The time they took deciding who would be the boss, couldhave been valuable time used to organize a clean-up plan and actually start cleaning. Alyeska had a big part in this also, since they are responsible for 25% of Americas oil and the navigation control. The state and the federal coordinates decidedthey would carry out with whatever plan was in place at the time. The plan had beendeveloped between 1984-1987. It spelled out how fast Alyeska was to respond tovarious spill scenarios. On March 24-25, Aleska’s response did not take shape the wayit should have. A barge was out of service; equipment was buried under several feet ofsnow; skimmers and other on-the-water response equipment was unavailable. Theclean up was six to eighteen hours behind the response schedule in the plan. Eventually, the plan took shape the way it was designed. Weak planning had a long history. About five years before, Exxon had developed an oil spill plan, just in case of an accident. As time went on, an accidentnever occurred, so Exxon decided they did not need this committee . They put theequipment into storage and did not keep up with an updated plan. Fisherman were ready to help out at any given moment, but n