Instead Ott sat by herself in a room 70 miles 113 km away and spoke to the people at the meeting in Valdez by phone Ott talked about the increasing number of tankers sailing to and from the Valdez terminal through the sound Many of the ships she noted were getting too old to operate safely And she warned that if a spill happened in open waters it might not be contained and cleaned up quickly Ott said the big one 1 a massive oil spill in Prince William Sound was bound to happen It’s not if but when it occurs and we’re not going to be prepared as a community 2 As Ott spoke on the phone a ship loaded with oil was about to leave the Valdez Marine Terminal The Exxon Valdez was almost 1,000 feet 305 meters long and as its name suggested it was owned by Exxon one of seven companies that operated the pipeline and terminal The seven had formed the Alyeska Pipeline Services Company in 1970 Exxon was the largest of the companies involved and the largest U S oil company When it was delivered in 1986 the Exxon Valdez was the largest ship ever built on the U S West Coast That night at about 9 20 the Exxon Valdez slowly made its way out of the
port carrying 53 million gallons 200 million liters of fuel oil Commanding the ship was Captain Joseph Hazelwood At 42 he had worked for Exxon for 19 years and he had won safety awards from the company in 1987 and 1988 But as the Exxon Valdez ship headed into the sound Hazelwood was not on the bridge giving course and speed commands As was usually done a harbor pilot guided the tanker through a narrow waterway about 7 miles 11 km out of the port Hazelwood came to the bridge shortly after 11 p m before the pilot left the ship Hazelwood soon saw on radar that large chunks of ice had drifted into the path that he would normally take to reach the open sea The ice had broken off the nearby Columbia Glacier The captain contacted the U S Coast Guard’s Vessel Tracking Center in Valdez to explain the situation The center followed the movement of all ships coming into and leaving Valdez The center gave Hazelwood permission to use the sea-lane that ships normally used to enter the harbor After a while Hazelwood left the bridge leaving third mate Gregory Cousins in charge of putting the ship back on its usual course once it passed the ice But something went wrong as the huge ship cut through the waters of Prince William Sound Lookout Maureen Jones entered the bridge and told Cousins the ship was mistakenly on the wrong side of a buoy light Cousins ordered a shift in course to try to get on the right side of the buoy but the tanker could not respond quickly enough Just after midnight on March 24 Good Friday Cousins called down to Hazelwood’s cabin Sir the third mate said I think we have a serious navigational problem 3 Still on the phone Cousins felt a series of bumps as the steel hull of the ship smashed into the rocks of Bligh Reef The sailors quickly realized that their ship was aground They and Hazelwood also soon discovered that the collision had ripped holes in the ship’s hull Millions of gallons of Prudhoe Bay oil were now flooding into Prince William Sound
At 12 26 a m Hazelwood radioed the Coast Guard to say the Exxon Valdez was aground He added And ah evidently we’re leaking some oil and we’re gonna be here for awhile 4 Hazelwood tried to rock the ship off the reef though that had its own dangers A computer report showed that the ship could sink without the rocks holding it up Hazelwood finally gave up trying to free the ship as more oil poured out of its holds Through holes in its smashed steel hull the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled millions of gallons of oil into Prince William Sound News of the crash and oil spill spread to all the organizations responsible for preventing such a spill and cleaning one up if one did occur Along with the Coast Guard other U S officials soon knew about the situation at Bligh Reef So did environmental agencies in Alaska and officials at the pipeline company and at Exxon’s headquarters in Houston Texas
The spilled oil damaged more than 1,000 miles 1,600 km of shoreline Around 3 a m two Coast Guard officers and Dan Lawn of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation DEC headed out to Bligh Reef Even before reaching the ship Lawn could smell the strong foul odor of the oil Nearing the Exxon Valdez Lawn saw oil bubbling on the water’s surface Like Ott and other Alaskans who lived in and near Valdez he had feared that a major oil spill would one day threaten the environment around Prince William Sound Now it seemed to have happened But he didn’t know what Exxon officials in Houston did Thanks to computer reports sent directly from the ship the company realized it was facing the worst oil spill in U S history While Lawn didn’t know the full extent of the spill he knew that Alyeska was slow to respond Under contingency plans on file with the Alaska DEC the company was supposed to send equipment to contain a spill within five hours of an accident As that deadline approached no cleanup ships were in sight Acting quickly was especially important in this case Alyeska needed to get the remaining oil off the ship a process called lightering With some of the oil already gone the ship was unevenly balanced on the reef The Coast Guard
