The Exxon Valdez: Alaska’s Environmental Armageddon

this video is brought to you by squarespace whether it's your new professional just a lifelong passion start your journey to website glory with squarespace check out their awesome all in one platform through the link in description below more on them in a bit it's one of the biggest environmental disasters in american history on a cold march night in 1989 the oil tanker exxon valdez ran aground on bly reef in prince william sound alaska triggering the mother of all spills across the following days over 10 million gallons of oil leaked out into the pristine wilderness wreaking havoc on the wildlife there hundreds of thousands of seabirds died local salmon and herring populations completely collapsed devastating the region's economy 1 300 miles of coast were inundated with oil resulting in a cleanup operation that lasted years prior to deepwater horizon in 2010 no other oil spill in u.s waters had caused such destruction yet the story of the exxon valdez is more than just the story of a disaster it's also the story of a very human catastrophe one that ruined lives destroyed families and left a deep psychological scar in this part of alaska that arguably hasn't healed to this day today we're examining the events before and after one of america's most notorious oil spills and investigating the impact that it still has there over three decades later it was 11 22 pm on the night of march 22 1989 when the exxon valdez pulled into dark at the alieska marine terminal by now people living in the nearby town of valdez were used to seeing such vast tankers plying the nearby waters 12 years earlier in 1977 the trans alaskan pipeline had gone into operation bringing oil and oil money gushing in since then the alieska terminal and valdez itself had become an important oil hub exporting millions of gallons of crude oil every day on ships that traveled down the west coast or headed out across the ocean for distant lands the port wasn't without dangers ships had to navigate a thin strip of water known as the valdez narrows beyond that lay prince william sound home to icebergs and hidden underwater reefs but in the decade plus of giant tankers traversing these waters there had yet to be any major accidents sadly this good luck streak was about to end no one in valdez that night had any way of knowing it but in a little over 25 hours their local community was going to become ground zero for an environmental disaster that would change u.s history as the exxon valdez entered the dark it must have been an awe-inspiring sight the second newest tanker in the exxon fleet the valdez was also by far the biggest clocking in at nearly a thousand feet long it was capable of holding in excess of 50 million gallons across all 11 of its storage tanks in fact at the time it was constructed in 1986 it was the biggest vessel ever built on the american west coast but that didn't mean that it was the best on the eve of the disaster the tanker's radar system hadn't been working properly for nearly a year nor had it ever been fitted with the long-promised iceberg monitoring equipment still there was nothing about it that screamed catastrophe in the making it was a solid ship as unremarkable as any of the other tankers that routinely passed through prince william's sound and its crew seemed pretty unremarkable too his captain was joseph hazelwood an industry veteran with a 138 iq and a spotless record the sort of guy who could toss off oscar wilde quotes as easily as he could discuss arcane points of shipping law although he was known to have lost his car license back in new york for drunk driving hazelwood was considered to be a good egg indeed he'd even won the exxon fleet safety award for two years running alongside hazelwood the exxon valdez was crewed by 19 additional people of whom third mate gregory cousins was perhaps the key member hugely overworked cousins was the guy who oversaw the valdez putting into port on the night of march the 22nd 24 hours later he'd be the ones standing on the bridge as everything went to hell when the dust finally settled prince william's sound was awash with oil it went to cousins and captain hazelwood that the world turned looking for someone to blame but for now the men simply did their jobs preparing the ship to be loaded up as it had been scores of times before the first oil began to flow into the exxon valdez's tanks just after 5 am on the morning of march 23 1989. six hours later the loading's still underway captain hazelwood left behind cousins and headed into the nearby town for some r r we can only hope he enjoyed it because after that day it would be over a decade before joseph hazelwood was able to relax again the exact whereabouts of captain hazelwood on march the 23rd would be a source of ongoing controversy after the crash it's known that he did some shopping in nearby valdez that he got some food and that he presumably took in the awe-inspiring views of the mountains surrounding the small town but this wouldn't be what people cared about in the aftermath of the spill no they cared about whether captain hazelwood got drunk for such a seemingly straightforward question pinning down an answer would be mighty difficult eyewitnesses reported seeing hazel wood in two bars where it seems he did consume alcohol but while the drunk captain would become such a part of exxon valdez law that it was still being used for jokes on american dead over two decades later it's actually not known how much hazelwood drank that day that's because the blood samples taken after the crash were badly mishandled meaning that they were inadmissible as evidence while some witnesses would claim hazel would return to the ship with watery eyes and booze on his breath the generally accepted account is that he had two or three drinks in the afternoon not ideal but not enough to affect his performance of similar interests were the actions of third mate gregory cousins while hazelwood was out in town getting pizza and sneaking a few cheeky beers in cousins was supposed to be asleep he had a scheduled nap slot from 1 30 pm to 5 pm intended to make sure that he'd be awake and alert once the exxon valdez headed back out of port but instead of napping cousins spent the day pacing the ship filling in reports and taking an early dinner the upshot by the time he came back on duty it was estimated that it had barely six hours sleep in the past day as with hazelwood's drinking cousins poor sleep patterns would soon destroy his professional reputation it was 8 30 when the captain at last returned from baldese by now it was a dark chilly night typical of alaska in march temperatures were hovering around 33 fahrenheit half degrees celsius and a light miserable rain was falling over the water out beyond the valdez narrows icebergs were drifting through prince william sound ready to titanic the hell out of any boat that crashed into them while the conditions were grim though they weren't limiting visibility was around 10 miles enough that you'd need to be really dumb or really unlucky to crash a ship in the coming months the public would form its own ideas about which category captain hazelwood fell into the exxon valdez finished loading almost two hours ahead of schedule allowing the crew to set sail earlier than expected by 12 minutes past nine the tanker was in the water again two tug boats guiding it towards the valdez narrows from there the ship would turn south heading down the west coast finally unloading its cargo in long beach california over 2000 miles away as we already know though the tanker would never make it at 10 to 11 that evening the ship passed out of the narrows and into the open waters of prince william sound the fateful journey had at last begun in a little over 70 minutes the exxon valdez would have sailed out of the harbor and into history and if you want to sail right into history in a good way it's time to partner up with today's video sponsor squarespace now more than ever people are getting creative with their time they're reaching into their bank accounts to start a new business or maybe launch a blog something like that you know the world is really yours and squarespace is the perfect web tool to help you fashion it into whatever you like it's the platform to use when you're ready to get started on that web project that you've been thinking about so you're looking to get in quick without thinking too much about what your website should look like bam use one of squarespace's quick and beautiful templates to make a website that's fresh and for you like it's right out of the box or maybe you're more of a hands-on person you have lots of questions and ideas about what exactly your site should look like squarespace gives you all the customization options you could ever want with no updates no patches no technical bs to worry about and once you're done setting up your website tinkering with the design if you're so inclined or maybe playing around with the colors there are so many extra features that squarespace provides so that your website can thrive email campaigns patronage portals social integrations member only areas analytics commercial options 24 7 support everything you really could need in one place so when you're ready to get started on the next project of yours big or small if it involves a website it's got to be with squarespace right now you can go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash geographics and you'll save 10 of your first purchase of a website or a domain and let's get back to it with approximately two million barrels of oil being hauled across it every day shipping traffic in prince william sound was tightly regulated the exxon valdez couldn't just come drunkenly roaring out of the port at 200 miles an hour and do the aquatic equivalent of donuts until it crashed into something instead the sounds traffic followed two lanes one for inbound and one for outbound all separated by half a mile of clear water normally the system worked just like a regular single lane highway with each ship sticking in its relevant lane however just as you might swerve your car into the other lane to avoid crashing into a misplaced drunk or a wandering child so too could ships leave their lanes in prince william sound but rather than drunks or children or even drunk children the thing tankers would be swerving to avoid were icebergs in the spring months swerving around ice was just something that happened in the sound a few hours before the exxon valdez came through another tanker had pulled the same maneuver so when captain hazelwood radioed the vessel traffic center to get permission to switch lanes they were all like well go ahead around 11 39 pm the exxon valdez passed out of its lane gliding past a chunk of ice as they moved through the clearwater separating the lanes hazelwood ordered a course correction and had the ship placed on autopilot it was a minor moment one which no one would have ever bothered to store in their long-term memory under normal circumstances but it was also the moment that everything began to go wrong nobody realized it but hazelworth's course correction was taking them not around the iceberg but away from it away from the shipping lanes out into open water out towards the danger of bly reef an infamous reef that had been responsible for previous sinkings bly reef in 1989 was lit by warning beacons but it seemed no one on board the tanker noticed at seven to midnight captain hazelwood exited the bridge leaving the ship in the hands of gregory cousins by now extremely tired cousins had been meant to go off duty too but he'd agreed to take on an extra shift to help out a friend as good friday dawned he was the only person on the bridge just one sleep-deprived man standing between the exxon valdez and disaster perhaps it's no surprise what happened next just after midnight cousins seemed to have realized that the ship was way too close to blair reef he ordered a turn made quickly but there was no time no time to do anything but watch in horror as the catastrophe unfolded that catastrophe announced itself captain hazelwood with six sharp jolts at four minutes past midnight on march the 24th the exxon valdez hit the reef tearing open its hull and rupturing eight of its eleven tanks oil rushed out the gaping wound and into the black waters causing a shimmering slick to grow around fly reef realizing what was happening hazelwood ran back to the bridge there he radioed the coast guard and his employers before ordering the tank had to be pulled back off the reef by now though the ship was stuck fast although he fought for over an hour to free the exxon valdez from blyreave hazelwood couldn't do anything he couldn't do anything but impatiently stand by as the oil kept spewing out early that morning two men from the us coast guard boarded the stricken exon valdez they asked hazelwood what the problem was you're looking at it he replied it wouldn't be long before those four fateful words would come back to haunt him for the next three days an eerie calm held in prince william sound oil slowly seeped across the flat waters an ever-growing slick blooming around a crash tanker like a poison flower at this point separating the oil from the water would have still been fairly easy in theory at least in theory though the alieska pipeline service company's one ship for handling spills was out of service nor were there enough skimmers available to deal with such a massive leak a small number of disparates were applied but far too few to make a difference like it or not nobody could do anything but watch as the boudis spill grew and grew there were attempts to staunch the flow at the source a second tank of the eggs and baton rouge was sent to try and offload as much oil from the stricken ship as possible but it was already too late to stop an environmental catastrophe three days after the tank ran aground a storm blew up in prince william sound the churning waves tore apart and dispersed the giant oil slick one part sank beneath the surface another was sent hurtling into the nearby shoreline it was this last batch of oil that generated the famous pictures of dark beaches slick with crude smothering local wildlife soon over 1 300 miles of alaskan coastline were affected seabirds coated with oil became incapable of flying and drowned fish had their gills destroyed other animals simply ingested the oil while trying to clean themselves a death sentence as assured as if captain hazelwood had just stuck a shotgun to their heads and fired by the time anyone tried to launch a serious cleanup operation so much oil had leaked that containing it was just impossible it had also triggered a storm of pr so bad that it looked like it could sink exxon entirely for millions of americans the site of a pristine wilderness in alaska fouled by oil was a call to arms people were outraged that something like this could happen the public pressure forced exxon to at last act decisively while their initial slow response in the first few days meant the disaster was made much worse by april the company was throwing everything they could at it 11 000 workers were hired by exxon at over 16 per hour to clean up the damaged shorelines over 2 billion was earmarked for dealing with the spill separately the coast guard the navy and the national oceanic and atmospheric administration all sent their own teams to help contain the oil and that's not even including the volunteers local alaskans joined those from outside the state to form their own cleanup crews trying to get to the places where the main effort wasn't reaching it was the start of a cleanup that would take four whole years over the coming months oil was burned off coated with disperance and mechanically scrubbed away from rocks using high pressure hoses animals trapped in the spill were individually taken to special sites for cleaning and treatment and then relocated to other areas until the leak could be controlled yet even all this superhuman effort wouldn't be enough to undo the damage when the cleanup was finally cooled off entire beaches were still coated with oil while gallons of crude had vanished into pockets in the ground where it still remains to this very day in short it was an environmental nightmare but it wasn't only ecologically that alaska suffered despite a boom in the hospitality industry around valdez as businesses sprang up to cater for the 11 000 workers most areas of the economy around prince william sound suffered horrific shocks tourism collapsed the destruction of salmon and herring populations killed off the fishing industry scores of people went bankrupt entire towns fell apart it was a wave of financial damage radiating out across alaska just as the oil itself had flowed out of the grounded exxon valdez and the worst part it still wasn't over [Music] the final estimated cost of the exxon valdez spill makes for chilling reading somewhere around a quarter of a million seabirds are thought to have died in the disaster alongside thousands of sea otters hundreds of seals and up to 22 killer whales to put some perspective on those numbers by 2019 30 years after the tanker struck bly reef local bird and whale populations still hadn't recovered and yet the ecological toll is only half the story those economically devastated towns all along the affected coast while they'd soon suffer a real human cost as well as both the disaster itself and the fallout ripped apart entire communities in the years following the exxon valdez spill incidences of mental illness in the region shot up everything from substance abuse to divorce and domestic violence saw an increase as people tried to cope without the tools to do so this is the part that often gets lost between the headline figures the all-too-real suffering that came in the wake of the fishing or the tourist industries collapsing the hardship hunger and years of misery that families were plunged into these were the silent victims of the exxon valdez the people who had nothing to do with the disaster and yet had to suffer the consequences the people whose suffering continued long after the media interest waned at its most tragic some seven suicides of locals were linked directly to the oil spill a death toll that all too often went unreported still it wasn't just alaskans who found their lives turned upside down by the crash in the wake of the disaster captain hazlewood was fired by exxon and had his license suspended by the coast guard during his preliminary court hearings the judge accused him of causing an environmental catastrophe on par with hiroshima for a while he became america's favorite punching bag yet when the trial finally came hazelwood was almost completely acquitted thanks to the botched blood sample he was found innocent of operating the tanker while drunk other felony charges were thrown out and in the end the captain was convicted of only a misdemeanor his sentence was to perform a thousand hours of community service and pay a fine of fifty thousand dollars while the judge wanted his community service to be spent cleaning up oil from the spill the appeals process only ended in 1999 when the cleanup was long over instead hazelwood spent his thousand hours picking up trash in alaska and working at a soup kitchen although he avoided serious legal penalties his infamy and his self-damning answer to the coast guards what's the problem with you looking at it hobbled his career as he once told outside magazine in the wake of the crash he went from a hundred thousand dollars a year to barely getting by the disaster also prompted major changes at a federal level in 1990 congress passed the oil pollution act increasing fines for companies responsible for spills and mandating all tankers in u.s waters have double hulls the act also banned the exxon valdez from ever re-entering prince william's hand again yeah as that sentence implies the tanker itself survived its fateful crash with bly reef on june 23 1989 the exxon valdez was finally towed out of prince william sound and down to a dry dock near san diego trailing a 10-mile oil slick out behind it the entire way operational again by 1990 exxon had initially hoped to send it back to work in alaska but the ban put paid to that so instead exxon valdez was sent to europe where it plied the waters as the exxon mediterranean and then as the sr mediterranean incredibly exxon spent the entire time suing the us government to try and allow this symbol of disaster back into prince william sound but it didn't work finally in 2002 the eu banned single hull tankers from its waters sent to asia the valdez changed its name twice more as it was sold to new companies its journey at last ended in 2012. by now known as the oriental nicety it was beached in india on august the 2nd that year before being dismantled and sold for scrap by this point though the disaster the exxon valdez caused had already been overshadowed on april 20 2010 the deepwater horizon drilling rig exploded in the gulf of mexico killing 11 workers over the following months over 134 million gallons of oil spewed into the ocean over 10 times the amount that the exxon valdez released yet while the exxon valdez spill is no longer the biggest in u.s history or even in the top 50 worldwide that doesn't mean it deserves to be forgotten for people alive in alaska in 1989 the spill in prince william sound was a transformative moment one that shook up hundreds of thousands of people's lives for some the spill ignited a burning desire to volunteer to help clean up for others it led to an intense justifiable anger towards both exxon itself and the government that seemed incapable of dealing with its mess but for others the spill was simply a scarring painful thing a long trauma that unfolded before the world one many in alaska are still dealing with today from our vantage point three decades later it's tempting to write the exxon valdez off as history something that happened a long time ago in a different time in a different world the truth though is that there are so many alive today who are still affected by it so many communities both human and animal that are yet to fully recover the exxon valdez spill may have long since been overshadowed but its impact on our world will sadly still continue for many many years so i'm not going to ask whether you enjoyed that video but i do hope you found it informative and interesting if you did please do click that like button below don't forget to subscribe also please do support our fantastic sponsors squarespace who are linked to below and thank you for watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 165,351

Keywords:

Id: nyWcuba4eZs

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021