Word: tankerful
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...Exxon, meanwhile, the nightmare keeps getting worse. After responding late and ineffectively to an accident that it could have prevented, the company finally refloated the crippled tanker last week, towing it about 25 miles to nearby Naked Island for temporary repairs. But Exxon had trouble finding a dry dock that would accept the vessel. Cowper, who had cited the company's bungled attempts to manage the cleanup and called on the Coast Guard to take over, gave qualified approval to a belated offer of aid from the Bush Administration. The President remained opposed to the Government's directing the cleanup...
Much of the outrage continued to focus on Exxon's reliance on Joseph Hazelwood, the Exxon Valdez skipper, who was apparently drunk while on duty. The company announced last week that tanker crews will now have to be on board at least four hours before leaving port -- a regulation Exxon Shipping President Frank Iarossi admits is designed to provide sobering-up time. But Hazelwood had an unacceptably high blood-alcohol level nine hours after the incident, and so would have been impaired even under the new rules. Moreover, despite Hazelwood's several arrests for drunken driving and treatment...
...that matter, the accident might have been avoided had the Coast Guard's radar been electronically linked to the harbor's vessel-traffic system so that an alarm would sound automatically if a tanker wandered out of its correct path. Such a state-of-the-art system is in operation in at least one foreign port. Says Curtis of the Oceanic Society: "This is not just a case of someone getting drunk. Because the industry did not take responsibility for state-of- the-art technology, the problem lies at its doorstep...
...investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, the accident was preceded by a series of commands that put the vessel a mile out of the shipping lanes and into harm's way. Cousins and finally Hazelwood, who had returned to the bridge, issued contradictory orders. Shortly after midnight, the tanker impaled itself on Bligh Reef, its hull torn by gashes, some thought to be 15 ft. wide. At least 240,000 bbl. of oil, equal to 10.1 million gal., poured out of the wounds...
...supposedly impossible had happened. Since the building 15 years ago of the pipeline that carries Alaskan oil from the North Slope to Valdez for shipment by tanker to the West Coast, oil companies had been shrugging off environmentalists' forebodings of just such an occurrence. In January 1987, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium of oil companies (including Exxon) that manages the pipeline, filed a contingency plan with the Federal Government detailing how it would handle a 200,000-bbl. spill in Prince ; William Sound. Alyeska did so only grudgingly, however, protesting, "It is highly unlikely that a spill of this...