It killed fish, seabirds and other creatures, and coated more than a thousand miles of coastline with oil. Bob Day, who grew up and fished on Prince William Sound, while mending nets before the salmon season. His son Ed, shown here, is now a fisherman in Alaska. Angela Day, with a doctorate in political science from the University of Washington, has been an adjunct professor at Northern Arizona University. Someone else now runs the Snohomish business, but the Days hope to return to the Northwest.
Day became a fisherman before the Exxon Valdez oil spill. The quake devastated the salmon run. Yet within a few years, after a survey of Prince William Sound, hatcheries were established. He had a big boat, the Theresa Marie, named for his daughter, and became successful in the herring fishery.
In chilling detail, he recalled the morning the supertanker ran aground. He was in Sitka, Alaska, with the winter fishery. He woke in a hotel room before 5 a. Courtesy Angela Day Committed to fish from Sitka for a few days, he got reports from his home waters.
Flying back to Prince William Sound, he saw — and could smell — that it was truly that bad. Instantly overlaid by myth, the spill has become crystallized in the public imagination as the archetypal catastrophe, Captain Joseph Jeffrey Hazelwood its archetypal cause. The captain is nothing if not punctual, so we arrived at five o'clock, exactly on schedule, and waited a few minutes while the simulator's operator booted up its Valdez program. Hazelwood was eager to get started: In order to catch his train home to Huntington, Long Island, he calculated that he must depart here at , no later.
Now, as our facsimile tanker approaches the facsimile reef, he steps comfortably around the bridge, eyeing the engine-order telegraph, tweaking the radar, confidently adjusting the dials and knobs. Satisfied, he steps back and checks his watch: Beyond the frames of five bridge windows, the mountains of Prince William Sound part to reveal a passage ten miles wide.
Ahead, the monolithic main deck of the supertanker recedes toward the horizon. Winds are calm, skies dark, visibility eight miles. We've left the shipping lanes, just as the Exxon Valdez departed them in order to avoid ice. Radar shows that we're passing Busby Island, the spot where the tanker was to have begun its starboard turn back into the shipping lanes.
The ship begins to swing. After two minutes, during which time we've advanced a bare seven-tenths of a mile, our 1,foot, ,ton virtual supertanker—weighing 40, tons more than the Exxon Valdez—has turned on a dime. The buoy bobs innocuously off our port side. We've missed Bligh Reef by more than two miles. Eyes on the horizon, Hazelwood speaks. That's all anybody would have had to do. Hazelwood doesn't reply. The ship presses onward.
Bligh Reef buoy disappears from view. Minutes pass. Hazelwood doesn't move. His head fixes on the horizon, eyes reflecting the radar screen's endless clocklike whirl. Somewhere beneath us, a subway rumbles toward Penn Station.
Hazelwood lets it go. He stays on the bridge because eight years ago he didn't stay. He stays on the bridge because he is in purgatory and in purgatory you can laugh, or cry, or protest your innocence, but the only thing that matters is reliving your sin over and over until either you or God is worn out.
And that's the other thing you learn about Joe Hazelwood: He's served notice to God that it's not going to be him. It's my first meeting with Hazelwood, and he's standing in the cramped disarray of his 8-byfoot office, feet set wide apart, palms held out in parodic greeting. He's wearing a button-down oxford shirt, khakis, a Jerry Garcia-designed tie, and dress loafers, all of it enshrouded in the smoke and steam of his medicinal Marlboros and coffee. At 51, his body is that of a younger man: six feet, pounds, broad shoulders tapering to a inch waist, corded forearms below carefully rolled sleeves.
Beneath the graying skein of beard, the face is small and childlike, with leathery skin crosshatched and furrowed by wrinkles, russet-colored eyes set in a wary squint, and obstinately protruding lower lip.
He doesn't look at me as he talks, instead tipping his head toward the blue carpet. Eye contact comes in furtive volleys, to prevent the subtleties of his words from passing unnoticed or, worse, being misread for earnestness. After a few minutes it becomes apparent that Hazelwood's not going to sit down. An old shipboard habit, and not his only one. Drove everybody nuts. Kept cleaning off my desk, too. There have been other adjustments. Every morning begins the same way. Hazelwood's job, among other things, is to negotiate settlements between cargo insurers, which his firm represents, and the parties liable for the losses, usually the shipping companies.
Each morning brings a dozen or more new claims: delaminated plywood, sea-soaked paper, rancid plums, torn cellulose, rotting bananas. The files accumulate on his desk in great tilting stacks. Hazelwood makes a point of saying that he takes no joy in these incidents.
He mentions this because he's aware, as he is aware of each Kafkaesque plotline in his post-spill life, that the more shipwrecks and groundings there are, the harder he has to work and should you desire another level of irony the larger his year-end bonus will be.
When asked if he enjoys his present job, he hesitates and says yes. His desktop calendar, set on December , is thickly brocaded with urgently penciled squares, triangles, circles, and other unidentifiable scratchings so deep that in places the paper is cut through.
Reserved and awkward in formal social situations, he excels in the manly woof and banter of proletarian office life, transmitting the universally comprehended vibe of the Good Guy, that can-do, sports-literate, shoot-the-breeze brand of heartiness that simultaneously draws people close and holds them at a distance. He isn't, he points out, an indentured servant. A reluctant Exxon picks up his legal bills, as it must under employment law in California, where Hazelwood signed on with the Valdez.
Democratically, Exxon also indirectly funds Hazelwood's criminal prosecution, since 85 percent of Alaska state revenues are derived from oil taxes. Nor is he landlocked: His captain's license has been active since a nine-month Coast Guard suspension ended in After a brief string of temporary jobs—lobster fisherman, boat transporter—this job has the advantage of providing a staging area where Hazelwood can pursue the only vocation still open to him: defending himself in court.
I mean, bang a dock and it's on the front page—'Hazelwood does it again! It is, beginning with the trumpet-blare that the captain of the Exxon Valdez was, at the time of the accident, unqualified to drive his car in New York state because of drunken-driving violations. This week, an update on where the Exxon Valdez and the captain who ran it aground--Joseph Hazelwood--are today.
The ship was salvaged and renamed, and now carries oil from the Middle East to Europe. Hazelwood was acquitted on charges of being intoxicated on duty, but was convicted of a misdemeanor.
This summer, he begins serving his sentence: hours on litter patrol along Alaska highways. The ship was repaired after the spill but was banned from Alaskan waters by an act of Congress. Last year Exxon tried but failed to overturn that ban in the courts.
Today the ship carries oil from the Middle East to Europe, and since the accident it hasn't spilled a single drop. Eighties Club. January 29, At the time of the "Exxon Valdez" incident, his New York state driving privileges were suspended as a result of a driving under the influence arrest on September 13, March 28, Following rehabilitation he received 90 days of leave to attend Alcoholics Anonymous , but it is not clear if he attended during that leave. Hunter, Don. March 23, with 53 million gallons of crude oil bound for California.
A harbor pilot guided the ship through the Valdez Narrows before departing the ship and returning control to Hazelwood, the ship's master. The ship maneuvered out of the shipping lane to avoid icebergs. Following the maneuver and sometime after 11 p. He left Third Mate Gregory Cousins in charge of the wheel house and Able Seaman Robert Kagan at the helm with instructions to return to the shipping lane at a prearranged point.
March 24,
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