Word: valdez
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Captain Joseph Hazelwood heads for the mailbox these days, he no longer waves to his neighbors in Huntington Bay, N.Y. Instead, his head sagging, he hurries back indoors to the lonely anguish that has engulfed his life since the early morning of March 24, when his tanker, the Exxon Valdez, struck a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and leaked 11 million gal. of crude oil into the pristine waters...
...stream of Hazelwood songs and jokes, the death threats to his family from anonymous callers, some of whom promise to blow the pretty yellow house to smithereens. Whatever respite Hazelwood may have enjoyed as the story faded from the front pages probably ended last week, when the crippled Exxon Valdez, on its way for repairs, caused an 18-mile-long oil slick off San Diego. Suddenly the tanker was thrust back into the headlines...
...convicted of the criminal charges pending against him in Alaska. A two-month TIME investigation of the accident has unveiled a wider web of accountability in which Exxon and the Coast Guard appear to share some of the blame for the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. As the Valdez's captain, Hazelwood will bear the ultimate responsibility for the spill. But whether he was drunk or sober, his actions were not the only cause of the accident. The fiasco resulted from a confluence of breakdowns, both individual and organizational. The major findings of TIME's investigation...
...Aside from the question of Hazelwood's drinking, there is a dispute over the key issue of the Valdez accident: Was Third Mate Gregory Cousins qualified to be in control of the vessel as it headed out of the sound? Though the Coast Guard emphatically stated after the wreck that Cousins was not so qualified, the matter is far murkier. Federal regulations governing "pilotage endorsements" in the sound have been altered so often that Cousins may have met the standard that was in force at the time. Shortly before the accident, Congress was considering legislation that would have eased federal...
...booms and skimmers that are most frequently used suffer some basic flaws: they do not work in rough seas, and heavy crude tends to seep under a boom and clog a skimmer. Finally, the devices are all but useless when confronted with a devastatingly large spill like the Valdez disaster. Once the oil had spread over the vast Prince William Sound, a boat towing a skimmer needed fully 14 hours to clear one narrow swath across the 35-mile-wide bay. The chemical dispersants often used in oil cleanups have problems too. They cannot function in calm water, and because...