[Music] Southern Alaska is facing the worst oil pollution disaster in American history an emergency cleanup operation has been going on all day after a fully laden super tanker hit a reef on the 24th of March 1989 one of the world's largest super tankers ran ground on blly Reef in Alaska's Prince William sound the tanker Exxon Valdes was carrying 50 million gallons of crude oil we fetched up hard ground get some oil just past midnight on March 24th the super tanker Exxon Valdes crashed into a re off the coast of Southern Alaska one of America's most magnificent waterways is blackened and befouled tonight by the biggest oil spill in American history 240,000 barrels 11 million gallons of Alaskan crude oil escaped from the huge vessel the oil industry's response plans it promised a swift Cleanup in the event of a [Music] spill 7 hours after it struck Bly Reef the toxic slick from Exxon Val ales was already 2 mi long and 4 MI wide the tanker's single skin Hull had been ripped apart I ran out to the airport and the fisherman said report back tell us what you see you know we're talking happily cuz it's Cordova we go we fly out Orca Inlet we come around n's head and conversation just stopped I mean here is this incredible scene the sun is just starting to come up it you know it's an amazing scene and flat Cal down on the water surface is this Blood Red tanker in a black Inky stain and above it is this cloud of bluish smoke and we you know were flying along and all of a sudden we're into this smoke it was like instant headaches instant nausea and so we flew up above it and then we just circled and circled and circled we 9 hours after the record and there was not a spec of promised recovery equipment on the water this had all been promised within 6 hours and we were 3 hours past 6 hours and nothing 10 hours into the spill with the waterers flat calm conditions were were ideal for a recovery operation but the Alesa consortium's oil cleanup equipment was nowhere to be seen Not only was the alasa team late it could never have coped with a spillage on this scale already 11 million gallons of oil were fouling the Waters of the sound oil Executives the world's media and the governor of Alaska were all descending on the scene of the [Music] disaster the evidence is that the response was slow and inadequate uh I think that's with the alesca cleanup team still nowhere in sight the governor arrived to find Exxon the tanker's owners had taken charge and they had a plan of Their Own [Music] Exxon began limited tests of chemical dispersants to try to break up the oil the dispersants were controversial and it was unclear if they would work or cause even more harm the chemicals that you use to cause the oil to sink is very dangerous to marine life and we have to be certain that we cause a minimal amount of damage dispers it's an a to the Natural weathering process of oil in in water it was Al he worked for Exon and he's just telling everybody that this is the miracle cure the dispers will not be effective at all after the majority of the spill is cleaned up off the water and it looks like there's no more oil around the oil can be down in the water column and the Fisheries resources can still be affected weeks after the spill looks like it was cleaned up these dispersants are not the miracle cure and they do increase the toxicity of the dispersed oil it turns out Exxon had not prepared to use dispersant they didn't have enough in stock and to disperse a spill of this size there weren't even enough in the country by midafternoon the oil was slowly spreading covering over 20 mi of prime fishing Waters Al esa's Response Team finally arrived 13 hours late and only with enough equipment to collect 10,000 gallons nowhere near enough to recover their own cleanup Target of 8 million gallons nobody really knew what to do the whole idea was to start pumping the oil off but we never did that and we just said why don't they just abandon this tanker and call the Air Force in and just burn [Music] it 3 days into the spill and only 2,000 gallons of oil had been recovered with all communities dependent on the fishing industry local anger boiled over into public rouss with Exon that's what I want to know because you ask a question I know 2:30 this after knew there wasn't even a cleanex in the water to clean up that oil you you you have had some good luck and you don't realize it have to clean it up you have X on and we do business straight we will consider whatever it takes to keep you whole within 2 hours of the meeting came the local community's worst nightmare a force 10 storm in Alaska the state Governor has declared a state of emergency 70 mph winds are foiling attempts to clean up the massive oil spill it is now stretched to cover an area of at least 40 mes [Music] President Bush sent me up there as the comant of the Coast Guard to run this oil spill cleanup we overflew the area and a winter storm had come through and it had blown the oil completely all over the sound the Seas had beat against the islands and thrown up the surf and the oil was 6 and 8 ft up into the tree line one of our great failings was uh waiting for official people to tell us what to do it was a big mistake if we had not waited but just used our own native wit and sagacity and gone out in the field with this Fleet of vessels right at the outset which is what we really wanted to do we could have formed B basically a Bucket Brigade and scooped up a whole lot of oil the fisherman finally decided to take matters into their own hands their task to save 117 million newly hatched salmon from oil contamination the hatching farms for breeding pink salmon were now directly in the path of the advancing oil the oil slick has ruined 800 M of beaches and now there's a threat to Fisheries further down on the coast the key Hatchery was at Sawmill Bay the fisherman desperately needed booms underwater fences barriers to keep out the lethal oil folk this stuff floats go out there and you know open the doors and kick it out it's night they hear the big helicopters flying out there and then all of a sudden they hear this stuff hitting the water pop pop pop pop you know and plastic containers a size of desks are falling out of the sky down there around these fish boats no one had to tell them what to do there was a lot of important people showed up I remember them debating you know where to put these booms and by the time they tried figuring out the place to put it we already had it hooked up on a different spot where we knew where it should go the captain of the Exon the salmon fry rescue operation was a success but other Wildlife would not be so lucky [Music] [Music] 500,000 seabirds 3,000 otters over half the wildlife in Prince William's sound would perish the huge oil slick is continuing to grow it now covers more than 1,6 00 square miles if you can imagine the chaos that went along with Pearl Harbor being attacked and people doing what they could it was hard to think big enough The Spill would devastate one of the world's most beautiful environments and the communities that depended upon it Alaska is facing an ecological disaster thousands of seabirds are dying in the Slick which also threatens rare sea utters seals whales and salmon neither Exxon nor alasca the oil pipeline company in charge of the immediate response was ready for such a large spill alesca was supposed to have an emergency response team at its terminal in vald but 8 years ago the team was disbanded the response vessels were either under snow or being repaired they were completely overwhelmed Coast Guard didn't quite know what to do equipment to fight this spill has to be flown in from as far away as Texas in England Exxon says it's using all available resources but it argues The Spill is simply too big to surround with booms and skim it up as images of the spill appeared on the Evening News growing questions about how future disasters of this kind can be prevented and why there was such a slow response to this spill at the same time another story line was also taking hold the Exon spok person says there might have been a problem with Captain Hazelwood seems he had a bit of a drinking problem good evening the captain was drinking the captain has been fired that is the sum of it from Alaska tonight the story became Hazelwood top 10 excuses of the Exxon tanker Captain number 10 was trying to scrape ice off Reef for margarita that's a sensational kind of story you have an immediate assignment of responsibility an immediate villain what was lost in all of that was the company's responsibility when a pipeline to bring oil from northern Alaska to Valdes was approved in 1973 the oil industry in the federal government promised to make safety a priority the Alaska pipeline's on its way the environment will be saved the government initially supported doubleho hold tankers and a high-tech navigation system in vald we were given blanket assurances about safety and Spills in retrospect I aired and not making sure that almost that what was said was not put in writing those promises never materialized and when the state of Alaska passed its own safety law the oil industry sued saying the law infringed on federal Authority the court throughout the state's plan so no double hul tankers much more freedom to determine where the navigation channel would be when the pipeline first opened tankers were closely monitored by the Coast Guard and stayed in the shipping lanes even when they were clogged with ice flows instead of diverting out of the channel they were supposed to slow down but by the time the Exxon Valdes left Port the Coast Guard routinely allowed ships to leave the channel to avoid the increasing amount of ice slowing down was not something they want to do because time is money judging by radar I will probably divert from the TSS and end up in the inbound Lane there's noing traffic over a few minutes after that message the Coast Guard wasn't monitoring the Valdes on its radar the Coast Guard is supposed to be the check in case the ship makes a mistake and they weren't they weren't watching the ship captain Hazelwood turned the bridge over to third mate Gregory three cousins and went to his quarters after giving instructions to maneuver around the ice did you have any concerns about uh getting past the ice not at that time not at that instant cousins continued going South heading directly into ply Reef a federal investigation later found that cousins lost track of the ship's location and didn't turn back in time it found that reduced tanker Crews probably left cousins overworked and tired contributing to the accident a conclusion cousins and Exxon disputed the investigation faulted hazelwood for leaving the bridge and said his judgment was impaired by alcohol Hazelwood denied he was drunk and was later acquitted of criminal charges related to drinking did they have some fault yes but the real fault was there wasn't the safety in net Exxon spent more than $2 billion cleaning up The Spill and says there was no long-term environmental damage for a community like chinab Bay which had been in that area of Prince Williamstown for 10,000 years for the first time in their history they were afraid of their own food supply and what their future H this was more than a big deal for those communities this was a challenge to how their way of life could continue images of dead Wildlife were beamed across the world their impact was instant there were protests boycotts of Exxon petrol stations and thousands of Exxon credit cards were returned or destroyed a th000 miles of the sounds Coastline was now contaminated with oil I was out on an island that had about six Ines of oil on top of the Cobblestone and out there there was a Eskimo woman and she was oil from head to foot they were trying to wipe up the oil with rags and she had oil in her hair she had oil in her all over her Slickers it was cold it was raining half raining half snowing and the wind was blowing and I came across her and I said ma'am what are you doing out on this island some 30 mil from Cil ization she looked at me and she said Admiral This Is My Land This Is My Land and when she said that you know at that point if it became just a job it suddenly became a [Music] mission getting the oil out of the water had been a failure the task now was to get it off the beaches under the Gaze of the world Exxon accelerated its cleanup operation get it up get it up get it up we accumulated all of the available boom in the Free World we brought in enough boom to go around Manhattan Island three times to be able to put people out on those shorelines we had to build Hotel ships there are no hotels out there there's no place to live it was H quite something I mean if you're just interested in bringing machines into remote places was quite impressive because they had high pressure hydraulic systems hot water big nozzles and they would direct the water at the beach and in some cases several going on at once as the days went by the cleaning intensified 6 weeks into the spill Exxon had hundreds of workers on the beaches you spent anywhere from 8 to 12 hours on the beach spraying and they'd rotate people would rotate and um there would always had to be someone behind you to help you because the power of the water was really forceful as the cleanup continued Exxon also now turned to the local fishermen for help they had no vessels so they had to hire locals fishing vessels to try to do a spill response there was also a public relations component to that certainly but they had to get vessels out there with booms and skimmers to try to mount a spill response so they hired a lot of vessels to do that at very very high Charter rate but the sudden influx of money into a now devastated fishing Community had unforeseen consequences some people prospered you know like profiteers in War uh some people became Exon [ __ ] other people were purer than pure it was really a great opportunity to make a shitload of money people were toasting you know Joe Hazelwood in the bars in valz they were making more money than they ever saw before in their life it was a time to really get rich you could really profit off this thing I mean you just cannot believe how bad it was for those of us who really give a [ __ ] June by now 11,000 workers were cleaning the heavily solded beaches but the manner of the cleaning was becoming a source of conflict it was horrible the steam the hot water wiped out everything that had survived the initial oiling so the clams the muscles the seps and left bare rock tide would come in more black oil have to steam clean it again but meanwhile there's no life on these beaches now at all my feeling is whatever you killed there's plenty more of it right down here and it's going to come back if you don't remove the oil nature is going to eventually remove it but it's going to look bad for a long time and the publicity is going to be horrible you kill some Little Critters in the process You couldn't possibly kill them all so they're going to repr propagate the huge oil slick left by the crippled ship is continuing to grow it now covers an area nearly twice the size of Mainland Britain and it's causing even more damage to the Ecology of the area than was at first [Music] feared I had some 45 vessels out in the field 250 people collecting Wildlife birds and otters I got a phone call have your Fleet quit col collecting OTS because you're not authorized it a terrible moment you have to have special license and so on and the folks that managed them basically told people they couldn't touch them well you couldn't stop people from touching them and they're dying yet fishermen who were shooting them the day before the spill are now collecting them trying to protect them and when you ask the fisherman about it said you know these otters didn't do anything to anybody we have to do what we can to save our resource and so they went from shooting them to picking them up and it was something you couldn't stop [Music] among many of exxon's workers there was now a growing unease not simply with the methods but with the cleanup itself we all knew what was going on the only thing they did was made a good show because people were on the beach they were spraying and if you looked at that you thought oh wow they're really cleaning those beaches but it was pointless it was just show when they collected the oil there was never a lot in the containers and I would look and I would see that and I think oh my goodness it's just a waste the T ER which caused the Alaskan oil spill has been refloated as the Exxon Valdes was freed from The Reef in Prince William sound a New York judge set bail at a million dollars for the tanker's former Captain Joseph Hazelwood is accused of drunkenness and recklessness Captain Joseph Hazelwood would later have his drunkenness charge dropped he admitted drinking but hadn't been breath alized in time found criminally negligent for the spill he was fined and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service sweeping the streets of [Music] Alaska fishermen in Prince William sound have filed lawsuits against the owners of the tanker and the Alaska environment Department they're accused of gross [Music] negligence Exxon 2 would be criminally convicted over the spillage but the case that would grab the headlines centered on the communities of Prince Willam Willam s essentially when the oil hit the water it not only contaminated the entire environment but it shut down entirely all commercial fishing and other commercial activities dependent on the water 35,000 people's livelihoods were affected in a landmark case they sued Exxon Exxon at the time wanted people to sign waivers basically releasing Exxon from further Financial liability if they accepted exxon's meager payout that year and Exxon was saying take it or leave it if you leave it you know we'll see you in court my trial team consisted essentially of 12 lawyers and probably 20 pargal during the summer of the trial Exxon had 200 lawyers here in Anchorage so I always thought we had them outnumbered our charge was that they knowingly and consciously allowed a drunk to drink on the job the night of March 23rd March 24th and as a result of his drunkenness he ran his tanker up on the rocks on a reef that had been charted by Captain Cook and had been on the charts over 200 years it's not like this was a hidden rock pile it had a light on it in September 1991 three Summers after the spill Exxon declared the beaches safe 25% of the oil had evaporated and of the rest the company felt it had removed what it [Music] could but doubts still remain about the scale of the cleanup there still exists long-term environmental damage in Prince William S after three Summers of $2 billion worth of work 13,000 workers 1,000 vessels 100 aircraft they recovered maybe 5% of what was spilled so pretty ineffective pockets of oil remain beneath the surface of some beaches more than two decades later Prince William sound is not the same as it was the environment still has not fully recovered and we're over two decades into this step Exxon paid $300 million to those hurt by The Spill and a jury later awarded another $5 billion in punitive damages Exxon appealed delaying the case for 14 years and leaving lasting bitterness in Alaska 4,000 of the original plaintiffs have died since the Exxon valines in 2008 the Supreme Court cut punitive damages to a tenth of the original amount the community is is still very depressed fishermen like Mike Weber say the local economy never recovered 500 people left that's a lot in a small community I'll never recover from from the O spill after the spill Exxon became an industry leader in safety and millions of federal dollars were designated for cleanup research Congress required better contingency planning double Hall tankers and Tugboat escorts and Prince William sound we were now making traffic out of vald's probably the safest line of Passage anywhere in the globe wild life is gradually returning the Otters and the salmon have recovered but the killer whales face Extinction here and the Herring fishery once the great Lifeline of Prince William sound remains close but the accident exposed the inattention to oil industry safety and led to promises to repair the damage that had been done we will consider whatever it takes to keep you hold and to do more to stop future spills we also rededicate ourselves to Transportation safety and to realistic planning for accidents that do occur nearly 25 years later what happened to the promises made in the wake of the Exxon Valdes the explosion happened at the deep water Horizon rig Tuesday night now everyone's hoping and praying that the Gulf of Mexico rig doesn't turn into an environmental disaster we're going to fight it sub Sea on the surface and on the shore the gulf spill might already be as much as three times worse than the Exon vald disaster after the BP oil spill a presidential commission found that many lessons of the Exxon Valdes had been forgotten in the pursuit of offshore oil drilling I used the phrase that the offense got way ahead of the defense the potential risk had increased dramatically but there had been no commensurate increase in our capability to avoid an accident or to respond to it it found that the major oil companies had made only a minimal investment in new response technology and the government spent less than half the authorized amount on cleanup research the emphasis is always on preventing these things from occurring because when they happen we're not very well equipped to deal with them the news was again filled with the struggle to contain a massive spill using much of the same crude cleanup technology used 20 years earlier we're still relying on booms still relying on skimmers still relying on shovels and response plans that were again unrealistic lawmakers are alarmed that BP's competitors have given the government nearly identical emergency response plans those plans include steps to protect Wildlife that does not even live in the gulf and the government authorized BP to use nearly 2 million gallons of dispersants though many of the same questions were still unanswered the key question that scientists are trying to figure out is whether oil dispersants in the deep ocean do more harm than good the commission also found that while tanker safety improved after valz the oil industry resisted new offshore drilling safety rules it was reflective of a culture in the offshore oil industry we ended up 20 years after Exxon Valdes with an even more serious incident but no better prepared to avoid it or deal with itame the other oil companies including Exxon have denied that a systemic problem exists we would not have drilled the well the way they did 3 years after the spill new commitments have once again been made to improve spill prevention and response 3 years out from Exxon Valdes there was still a deep commitment to applying the lessons that had been learned 10 years out that commitment had substantially eroded if you come back in the year 2020 and ask what have we learned are we safer I think we'll know whether we really learned the lesson of Exxon valdis Alaska America's Last Frontier the largest state in the Union vast remote and unbearably [Music] cold only the kondy Gold Rush Disturbed its peace as one of the world's greatest wildernesses with one area more revered than any other Prince William sound Prince William sound is arguably the finest Marine ecosystem in North America at the very Northern end of the coastal rainforest it's a wildly proplate place place of fish and marine mammals and bird life and even people who had grown up there all their lives are not humdrum about the [Music] place men and machines have come here they've come to what could be the new kondik but this time the Gold's the liquid variety crude oil which British Petroleum have struck here on the North Slope of Alaska it was the largest oil field ever discovered in North America estimates were for billions of barrels of oil oil companies BP Exxon and Arco had discovered a new gold mine for four years the pipe's been piled up here waiting for the politicians to make up their minds to decide what to do with them it took a fuel crisis to force that [Music] decision the Yon kipor war made getting Alaska's oil to Market a matter of political urgency because of that war most of the Middle Eastern oil producers have reduced overall production and cut off their shipments of oil to the United States an amendment proposed by Alaska's Senator Mike grael led to the solution and President Nixon signed off the pipeline last the pipeline's on its way the environment will be saved right no problem Mark you're an environmentalist right right you have no problems on this on the pipeline no great problems no great problem that's a way of saying there could be and so began the engineering epic of building the 800 miles of the trans Alaska pipeline from the Arctic circles prudo Bay to the Port Town of valdis at the head of Prince William sound the construction of it just took three years and 9 billion to build it the oil companies just threw money at it to get it done as rapidly as possible because they didn't care the arrival of the pipeline in Valdes in 1977 brought Untold riches to the oil companies who built it and to the people of Alaska [Music] Alesa Inuit for Alaska was the name chosen by the oil companies for the Consortium they set up to run their vald operations filling two tankers a day Alesa would transport 2 and a half billion barrels of oil a year to Mainland America if anything went wrong it was the alasca consortium's job to put it right by the early ' 80s there had been enough low-level incidents to alarm the fishing communities of Prince William S their biggest fears concentrated on the alesca consortium's ability to deal with a major oil spill by the mid 80s the Valdes terminal was shipping out 20% of American amica's oil $100 million worth every day Alaska had become an oil state with the alasa Consortium the dominant power by the late 80s Dan Laur had become alarmed by the alasa consortium's cutbacks on its environmental safeguards and the failure of the state to regulate them I wrote a memo in December of 84 talking about how everything was being gutted and at the end of it I'd say our our failure to act on this is basically a signal to the oil industry that state of Alaska no longer cares it operated 12 years without a catastrophic spill and so there's sort of this dismissive attitude that well if there's a. 1% probability of something happening should you attend to that if a 99.9% of all these tankers are going to go out just fine why should we focus on the potential for a catastrophe well now we know why