Okay, let's get into this. I want you to, for
a second, just imagine a place. Picture it. It's
just after midnight and it is freezing cold.
I mean, the kind of cold that hurts your teeth.
Moan chilling, yeah. Exactly. The date is March
24th, 1989. And you are in the middle of Prince
William Sound, Alaska. It's one of the most remote,
pristine places on the entire planet. It really
is. I mean, to get there, you need a helicopter,
a plane, or a boat. That's it. It's this incredibly
quiet, almost sacred -feeling wilderness. Glaciers,
black water, just silence. Total silence. And
in the middle of that silence, in the pitch dark,
a sound rips through the air that, and this is
not an exaggeration, is going to change, well,
everything. It's the sound of metal tearing,
a massive, horrifying sound. It's the hull of
a supertanker, the Exxon Valdez, which is what,
almost 1 ,000 feet long? Three football fields,
end to end. Three football fields of steel grinding
and ripping open on a reef. And just like that,
the story begins. Now, look, everyone listening
knows that name, Exxon Valdez. It's become, you
know, shorthand. It's the go -to reference for
an environmental catastrophe. Right. But here's
the thing. I bet if we asked 100 people what
happened, 99 of them would give you the exact
same, very simple story. The drunk captain story.
The drunk captain. That's the whole narrative.
And, you know, for this deep dive, that's where
we want to start. Because our mission today is
to look at this whole mountain of source material,
official reports, court records, scientific studies,
you name it, and go way beyond that fable. Exactly.
Because the easy story, the one bad apple story,
lets everyone else off the hook. Today we want
to uncover the systemic failures that made this
almost inevitable. And the cleanup, which...
I had no idea about this, but the cleanup itself
was, in some ways, a second disaster. A huge
counterintuitive mistake, yeah. And then there's
the part that is just, it's mind -blowing. The
connection between this spill and a financial
invention that helped crash the global economy
in 2008. It's a wild connection. And on top of
all that, we have to talk about the oil itself.
Because, and this is the big spoiler, a lot of
it is still there. Right now, today, it hasn't
gone anywhere. So let's start at the beginning.
Section one, the crash, the myth versus the much
messier reality. Let's just tackle it head on.
Captain Joseph Hazelwood. The villain of the
story. The narrative I've always heard is that
he was, you know, three sheets to the wind, joyriding
a super tanker and whoops. And it's a convenient
story, especially for Exxon at the time, because
if it's just one guy, a rogue employee, then
the system is fine. The company is fine. It contains
the blame. Perfectly. But when you dig into the
NTSB accident report, when you read the actual
trial transcripts, that story just completely
falls apart. So let's fact check it. Was he drinking
at all? He was. That part has a colonel's truth.
He was seen at a bar in the town of Valdez earlier
that day while the ship was still in port. OK,
so that part is real. That part is real. But
the crucial distinction, the one that changes
the entire story, is that by the time the ship
was out in the sound, by the time the actual
crash happened. He wasn't on the bridge. He wasn't
even there. He was in his stateroom. He was off
duty. Most accounts say he was probably asleep
when the ship hit the reef. So the image of him
at the wheel drunk, that's just a fabrication.
It is. And the courts confirm this. It's a huge
point. At his trial, 21 separate witnesses testified
that he did not seem intoxicated or impaired
around the time of the accident. 21 people. And
the jury listened. He was acquitted of operating
a vessel while intoxicated. The big charge, the
one everyone remembers, he was clear of it. He
was convicted of a much smaller misdemeanor,
negligent discharge of oil. But the drunk driver
label is legally and factually a myth. Wow. That
single fact completely changes the framing. If
the captain is asleep in his bunk, who is steering
this thing? The man in charge of navigation on
the bridge was the third mate, a guy named Gregory
Cousins. And this is where we see the first real
systemic failure, and it's a huge one. Fatigue.
The classic problem in shipping, trucking. Any
of these long haul industries. Absolutely. Cousins
was at the end of a long watch. He was tired.
Now, protocol says he should have been relieved
by the second mate. So where was the second mate?
The second mate had just pulled an absolute marathon
shift, getting the tanker loaded with all that
oil. He was completely exhausted. So Cousins,
trying to be a good guy, a team player, decided
not to wake him up. He thought he could handle
it. He thought he could handle it. He lets his
exhausted colleagues sleep. Which, you know,
you can understand the human impulse, but it
was a direct violation of company policy. The
bridge was understaffed. So you have a single,
tired officer making critical decisions. Yes.
But even then, there should have been safeguards,
right? There's technology, there's an autopilot,
there's radar. This shouldn't have been a catastrophic
failure. Which brings us to the maneuver itself.
Why were they even near a reef? Aren't there,
you know, shipping lanes for this? Like highways.
There are, but they weren't in it. And for a
good reason. The nearby Columbia Glacier had
been calving. Calving. Dropping huge chunks of
ice, basically icebergs, into the water. So the
main shipping channel was dotted with these massive
ice hazards. So they had to go off -road to avoid
them. Exactly. Captain Hazelwood, before he went
to bed, gave the order to leave the standard
lane, steer around the ice field, and then make
a turn to get back into the lane at a specific
point. A totally standard procedure, I assume.
It is, but it's a procedure that requires very
precise timing when you're piloting a ship that
is over 900 feet long and loaded with millions
of gallons of oil. It has an immense amount of
momentum. It's not turning on a dime. Not at
all. And Cousins, the third mate... He was supposed
to make that turn, but he delayed it. He missed
the window. And this is the part of the story
that, for me, goes from tragic error to something
much, much worse. The radar. The RAH system.
Raytheon collision avoidance system. And you
have to understand, this wasn't some primitive
blip on a screen. This was a sophisticated computer
aided system designed to prevent exactly this
scenario. It would have painted a clear picture
of Bligh Reef getting closer and closer. It should
have been screaming a warning at it. It should
have been. But it couldn't. It was broken. And
not just, you know, it failed that night. The
reporting from journalist Greg Pallast, and this
was confirmed elsewhere, is that the radar had
been broken and left disabled for more than a
year before the disaster. A year. On a supertanker,
how is that even possible? How does a company
like Exxon let a ship like that sail without
its primary navigation safety tool? Two words.
Too expensive. It was a budget decision. It was
a budget decision. The documentation shows that
Exxon management knew it was broken. They knew
it needed repairs. But they decided that the
cost of fixing it, and frankly, the cost of staffing
someone to operate it properly, was just too
high. They wrote it off. That reframes the entire
event. Yeah. It's not an accident caused by one
tired guy making a mistake. It's a predictable
outcome of a corporate culture that prioritize
budget lines over basic safety. 100 percent.
They made a calculated risk. And on March 24th,
1989, they lost that bet. So you have a tired
third mate on an understaffed bridge with no
functional collision avoidance radar steering
a three football field long vessel through ice
filled waters in the dark. A recipe for disaster.
The lookout, who is also up there, spots the
light on Bly Reef, but she misjudges the angle.
She reports it as being off the side of the ship
when it's actually dead ahead. No. By the time
Cousins realizes the catastrophic error, it's
too late. He orders a hard right rudder, a desperate
turn, he's on the phone trying to wake up Captain
Hazelwood, and then he feels it. The impact.
The helmsman at the trial just called it a bumpy
ride. Cousins described it as six very sharp
jolts. It must have been surreal, the sheer momentum
of that vessel. It didn't just hit the reef and
bounce off. It drove onto it. The ship was impaled.
It came to rest, perched on this pinnacle of
rock, which tore open the hull like a can opener.
How many of the tanks were breached? Eight of
the 11 cargo holds were punctured. Instantly.
And the oil just started gushing out. A torrent.
What was the rate of the spell? They estimate
5 .8 million gallons poured out in the first
three hours alone. It's almost impossible to
visualize that volume. And what's Hazelwood doing
at this point? He's awake. He's on the bridge.
He's on the bridge. And here's a terrifying detail.
His first instinct was to try and power the ship
off the reef. You tried to back it up. He was
revving the engines, trying to dislodge it, trying
to wiggle a 987 -foot tanker off a spike of rock.
That could have made it so much worse. Infinitely
worse. The first mate basically had to yell at
him, Captain, if you do that, the ship might
break in half. The reef was the only thing holding
the tanker's structure together at that point.
If it had slipped off, it likely would have capsized,
spilling its entire cargo. All of it. The whole
thing. That's a terrifying image. So the ship
is bleeding oil, the clock is ticking, and the
world is about to wake up to this. Which brings
us to section two, the response, which could
also be called chaos and chemistry. It really
feels like a tragic comedy of errors. It is.
I mean, you would logically assume that Valdez,
being the end of the Trans -Alaska pipeline,
a major oil port, would have a world -class instantaneous
oil spill response team on standby. Right. Like
a fire department. The alarm goes off. The boots
are in the water in five minutes. That is the
assumption. That was the plan on paper. But the
reality was a joke. When the call for help went
out, nothing was ready. The main response barge,
the one carrying all the containment booms. The
floating barriers that are supposed to circle
the slick. Yes. That barge was in dry dock. It
wasn't even in the water. It was buried under
snow, undergoing repairs. You're kidding me.
Not at all. And the skimmers, the boats that
physically suck the oil off the surface of the
water, they didn't arrive for a full 24 hours.
24 hours. By then, the oil isn't a manageable
spill. It's an unstoppable slick that's already
spreading for miles. And the weather was. calm
for the first couple of days. That was the window.
That was the only chance they had to contain
the worst of it. And they just missed it completely.
I saw a statistic in our source material that
I just can't get out of my head. After months
of cleanup, billions of dollars spent, what was
the final percentage of oil they actually fully
recovered from the water? The number that NOAA
and most agencies agree on is somewhere around
10 percent, maybe less. 10 percent. So 90 percent
of that crude oil just. stayed in the environment.
It either evaporated into the air, sank to the
seafloor, or most damagingly, it washed ashore.
And this is the pivot point. When the mechanical
cleanup with booms and skimmers failed so miserably,
they turned to a different strategy. Chemical
warfare. Essentially, yes. Chemical dispersants.
The main product they wanted to use was called
Corexit. I've heard of this. It's basically a
super detergent, right? Like a soap for oil slicks.
That's a great way to put it. It's a surfactant.
It breaks the surface tension of the oil, shattering
the big, thick slick into billions and billions
of tiny little droplets. And the theory is that
these tiny droplets then sink down into the water
column. And once they're down there, in theory,
naturally occurring microbes, bacteria can more
easily consume them. It's an out of sight, out
of mind solution. You make the ugly black slick
on the surface disappear. What? But there were
so many problems. First, their application was
a mess. There was a test flight with a helicopter
on March 24th, and it literally missed the slick.
The dispersant fell into clean water. An omen
of things to come. You could say that. But the
bigger problem was a massive political and social
fight. You had the local fishermen, the native
communities, the conservationists all screaming,
do not pour millions of gallons of unknown chemicals
into our pristine fishing waters. Which seems
like a very reasonable objection. You're trying
to solve a pollution problem by adding more pollution.
Exactly. So you had this huge battle between
Exxon and the Coast Guard, who wanted to use
it, and the state of Alaska, which was trying
to block it. all arguing about permits and toxicity
levels, the weather changed. The storm. A huge
storm rolled in on day three. We're talking 70
mile per hour winds. And that was it. That was
the point of no return. The wind and waves just
took that contained slick and spread it everywhere.
It was like taking a bucket of paint and hitting
it with a fire hose. It drove the oil onto hundreds
of miles of coastline. And it also changed the
oil's consistency. It whipped it up with the
seawater into this thick, sticky emulsion, a
mousse. Which the skimmers couldn't deal with
at all. Useless against it. So the fight moved
from the water. to the land, to the beaches.
And this is where we get to what is, for me,
the most shocking and important lesson from the
entire disaster. The hot water treatment. The
high pressure hot water. We've all seen this
image. It was on the news. For months, crews
in yellow hazmat suits, looking like heroes,
holding these powerful hoses and just blasting
the oil off the blackened rocks. And it looks
so effective, doesn't it? You see a black rock,
you blast it and it turns gray again. It looks
like you're winning. It was a fantastic public
relations move. It was an ecological nightmare.
A complete disaster. They were using seawater
heated to... 140 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about
60 Celsius. It's scalding hot. So what's the
problem with that? You're just washing rocks.
But you're not just washing rocks. A shoreline,
an intertidal zone, isn't just a pile of sterile
gravel. It is a living, breathing ecosystem.
It's coated in a biofilm. A biofilm. It's a layer
of microscopic life. Algae, plankton, fungi,
and crucially, bacteria. Those organisms are
the absolute bedrock of the entire coastal food
chain. Everything depends on them. And I'm guessing
some of those bacteria are the same ones that
are supposed to eat the oil. You got it. There
are naturally occurring hydrocarbon degrading
microbes in that environment. Given time, they
will slowly, patiently biodegrade the oil. It's
nature's own cleanup crew. But if you hit them
with... 140 degree water? You don't just displace
the oil. You cook the beach. You boil that entire
microscopic ecosystem alive. You sterilize it.
So they were killing the very organisms that
would have naturally fixed the problem over time.
They were creating a dead zone. And the science
on this is now crystal clear. Numerous studies
in the years that followed compared the cleaned
beaches to oiled beaches that were just left
alone. The untouched beaches recovered faster.
The biodiversity returned more quickly. The high
pressure hot water treatment actually set the
recovery back by years, maybe even decades. It
did more long term harm to the food web than
just leaving the oil there would have. That is
just it's a stunning lesson. in the arrogance
of thinking we can easily fix the complex systems
we break. It's a perfect example of the action
bias, the compulsion to do something, anything,
even if that something is destructive. It looked
good on camera, but it was ecologically devastating.
And the damage wasn't just to the microbes. The
humans holding those hoses, the thousands of
cleanup workers, they paid a steep price. They
did. You started hearing reports of something
they call the Exxon Valdez cough. This is the
human cost that often gets lost in the talk about
birds and otters. For sure. You had tens of thousands
of people, many of them local fishermen who'd
lost their jobs and needed the money, working
12 -hour days, breathing in a fine mist of aerosolized
crude oil and the chemical dispersant Corexit.
And Corexit has some nasty stuff in it. It does.
One of its main solvents is a chemical called
2 -betoxyethanol. And the science on that is
pretty clear. It's linked to damage to the liver,
kidneys, central nervous system, and blood disorders.
What was Exxon's position on these health claims?
Their official stance has always been that there's
no definitive scientific evidence of long term
health problems caused by the cleanup work. But
that's not the story you hear when you talk to
the people who were there. They tell a different
story. A very different story. Accounts of chronic
respiratory failure, neurological issues, cancers.
These people felt they were treated as disposable.
They were the ground troops in a toxic war and
they were given leaky rain gear as armor. It's
a grim picture. Which leads us directly into
the next part of this, section three, the ecological
toll, the body count, both then and now. And
the numbers, they're just numbing. They're so
large, they almost lose their meaning, but we
have to say them. Let's hear them. The best estimates
from government and independent studies suggest
anywhere from 100 ,000 to 250 ,000 seabirds were
killed. A quarter of a million birds. Around
2 ,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 247 bald
eagles, and something that really hits hard,
22 orcas. The killer whales. Yes. And it wasn't
just any 22 orcas. The impact on one specific,
unique group of orcas tells a much deeper story
than just the raw numbers. We need to talk about
the AT1 -polled. These are the Chugach transients,
right? Right. And transient is the key word.
These orcas are genetically distinct. They only
eat marine mammals. They have their own language,
their own culture, and they do not breed with
other orca populations in the area. They are
a unique, closed society. And they swim right
through the thickest part of the slick. They
did. And in the year after the spill, that pod
lost almost half of its members. But it's who
they lost that was so devastating. They lost
the matriarchs, the older reproductive females
who are the leaders, the memory keepers of the
pod. And orcas have such a slow reproductive
cycle. Losing the breeding females is a death
sentence. It's a death sentence for the lineage.
And that's what's happened. The pod has never
recovered a single member. Today, scientists
consider the 81 pod to be functionally extinct.
The few remaining animals are getting old. They
will live out their lives, but the pod will die
with them. A unique branch of life on Earth was
effectively erased by the spill. A ghost pod.
That's an incredibly sad term. It is. And this
story of collapse repeats itself, but in the
economy, too. Let's talk about the herring. This
connects the environmental damage directly to
the financial ruin of the local communities.
The town of Cordova, Alaska, was built on herring.
The spring herring run was their Super Bowl,
their Christmas. Everything rolled into one.
It was a multimillion dollar fishery. And what
happened after the spill? The interesting thing
is it wasn't immediate. The first couple of years,
the runs were OK. But in 1993, four years after
the spill, the herring population completely
catastrophically collapsed and it has never come
back. Why the four year delay? The leading scientific
theory is that the oil didn't kill the adult
fish directly. Instead, the exposure to the oil's
toxins damaged the eggs and the young fish. It
weakened their immune systems. So when a naturally
occurring virus came through the population,
a virus they normally would have survived, it
just wiped them out. So the spill made them vulnerable
to something else. It was a delayed death sentence.
And for the fishermen of Cordova, it meant their
livelihood wasn't just paused, it was gone. Forever.
The fishery has remained closed for 30 years.
Which brings us to the really big question that
hangs over all of this. We're talking three decades
later. Is the oil gone now? If you ask ExxonMobil,
their official corporate statement is yes. They
say the area is healthy and thriving and that
any remaining oil is inert and harmless. But
if you ask the scientists at NOAA... the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. You get
a very, very different answer. And that answer
is an emphatic no. And this is where that very
unappetizing mayonnaise analogy comes in. It's
a visceral image, but it's incredibly accurate.
Scientists from the USGS, a geological survey,
found that if you go to many of the beaches in
Prince William Sound today, right now, and you
dig down just a few inches into the gravel. you
will hit a layer of oil. Still liquid. Not exactly.
Over the years, the oil that got trapped under
the rocks was churned by the tides with seawater.
It emulsified. It formed this thick, gooey mousse.
Like mayonnaise. Exactly, the consistency of
mayonnaise. And then the very top layer of that
mousse was exposed to the air, and it hardened
into a crust, almost like asphalt. So it formed
a seal. Like a scab over a wound. A perfect seal.
And that scab protected the wet, gooey oil underneath
from oxygen, from water, from the microbes that
would normally break it down. So the oil inside
is trapped in a time capsule. It's almost as
toxic and undegraded as it was in 1989. So if
an animal like a sea otter is digging for clams
on that beach. And it breaks that crust, it gets
a direct dose of fresh 30 -year -old crude oil.
And this isn't just a trace amount. As of 2014,
federal scientists estimated there were still
between 16 ,000 and 21 ,000 gallons of this stuff
buried in the beaches. So for the animals living
there, the spill isn't a historical event. It's
an ongoing chronic exposure. That is the crucial
takeaway. It never really ended. OK, this is
a major pivot point in the story. We've talked
about the ecology, the chemistry, but the legal
and financial fallout was a whole other kind
of toxic spill. And this is where things get.
frankly bizarre. Section four, the legal and
financial roller coaster. Let's start with the
story of the Seattle 7. This reads like something
out of a John Grisham novel. It really does.
So it's 1991. Exxon is facing this enormous class
action lawsuit from fishermen, cannery workers,
native corporations. Everyone. And they are staring
down the barrel of a potentially massive punitive
damages award. Billions of dollars. Billions.
So they get creative. Their lawyers quietly approach
seven of the largest seafood processing companies
who are part of the lawsuit, the Seattle Seven.
And they offer them a settlement. It was more
clever and I would say more cynical than that.
They made a secret deal. Exxon paid these seven
companies a total of $63 .75 million in cash
right then and there. Okay, so what was the catch?
The catch was in the fine print. The agreement
stipulated that if these seven companies later
won any money from the big punitive damages trial,
they had to pay almost all of it back to Exxon.
Wait, wait, let me get this straight. Exxon paid
the plaintiffs to give back any money they might
win from Exxon. You got it. It was a hedge. Exxon
was betting against itself. They basically bought
an insurance policy from their own victims. If
the jury came back and slammed Exxon with a $5
billion fine, Exxon knew they'd get a significant
chunk of that money funneled right back to them
through this secret side deal. That feels deeply
unethical. It rigs the whole system. The judge
in the case, Russell Holland, thought so too.
When this secret deal finally came to light years
later, he was incandescent with rage. He said
it created a secret alliance and distorted the
entire legal process. But it just shows you the
lengths they were willing to go to mitigate their
financial risk. And speaking of that financial
risk, let's talk about the punitive damages themselves,
that $5 billion number. It became a legal ping
pong ball for almost two decades. The jury in
Alaska wanting to send a message awards $5 billion.
A landmark decision. Absolutely. But Exxon immediately
begins the appeals process. And it just goes
on and on and on. It goes up to the appeals court,
which reduces it. It goes back down to Judge
Holland, who bumps it back up. It goes back to
the appeals court, which cuts it again. It was
a legal war of attrition. And it all culminates
in 2008 at the Supreme Court. Exxon shipping
code V Baker. And there's a fascinating little
detail here. Justice Samuel Alito had to recuse
himself from the case. Why? Because he owned
a significant amount of Exxon stock. So it was
an eight justice court deciding the fate of this
fine. And what did they decide? In a 5 -3 decision,
they slashed it. They absolutely gutted the award.
From the original $5 billion to what? $507 .5
million. That's, what, 10 cents on the dollar?
About that, yeah. It was a devastating blow to
the thousands of plaintiffs, many of whom had
already died in the 20 years they'd been waiting
for their money. What was the court's reasoning
for such a drastic reduction? Their ruling was
that in maritime law, punitive damages should
generally not exceed compensatory damages, basically
a one -to -one ratio. The punishment shouldn't
be bigger than the actual calculated harm. And
what legal precedent did they use to justify
that? This is the amazing part. They cited a
case from 1818. A case called the amiable Nancy.
1818. They're using legal principles from the
age of wooden sailing ships and pirates to regulate
a multinational oil corporation operating supertankers.
That is precisely what they did. And it set a
huge precedent that has limited punitive damages
in maritime cases ever since. But this isn't
even the most incredible financial story to come
out of this. This is the big one. The connection
that you teased at the beginning. How does a
lawsuit over an oil spill in Alaska lead to the
two? 2008 global financial crisis. It is one
of the most unbelievable stories of unintended
consequences I've ever come across. So go back
to the beginning of the legal battle. Exxon is
facing that potential $5 billion judgment. Right.
They need to prove to the courts and their shareholders
that they can cover that cost if they lose. So
they need a massive line of credit. They need
a bank loan. A huge one. They go to one of the
biggest banks in the world, JP Morgan, and ask
for a $4 .8 billion standby line of credit. And
JP Morgan, I assume, wants that business. Exxon
is a huge client. They desperately want the business,
but it's also incredibly risky for them. Under
banking regulations at the time, if they set
aside nearly $5 billion for Exxon, that's capital
they can't use for anything else. It's dead money
on their books, and it exposes them to a huge
loss if Exxon were to somehow default. So they're
stuck. They want the deal, but it's a dangerous
deal. Exactly. So a brilliant team of young bankers
in J .P. Morgan's derivatives group came up with
a radical new idea. They said, what if we don't
have to hold the risk ourselves? What if we can
sell the risk to someone else? How would it even
work? They created a new kind of contract. They
went to another financial institution, in this
case, the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, and they made them an offer. Which
was? We, JP Morgan, will pay you a steady, regular
fee, like an insurance premium. In exchange for
that fee, if our client Exxon defaults on this
credit line, you agree to cover the loss. So
it's literally an insurance policy on a loan.
Precisely. They had invented the modern credit
default swap, a CDS. And this was the very first
major use of it. It was born directly out of
the Exxon Valdez litigation. And for this one
deal, it worked like magic. JP Morgan got the
risk off its books, bringing up its capital.
The European Bank got a nice, steady income stream.
And Exxon got its credit line. Everybody won.
In that instance, yes. But then Wall Street realized,
wait a minute, we can do this with everything.
We can create these swaps, these side bets on
mortgages, on student loans, on corporate bonds,
on entire countries. It allowed them to package
up risk and sell it off, so it felt like the
risk had just... Disappeared. It created a global
casino. And two decades later, it was those exact
instruments, credit default swaps, particularly
on subprime mortgages, that became the weapons
of mass financial destruction that blew up the
global economy in 2008. So the financial instrument
designed to handle the fallout from a toxic oil
spill ended up becoming the toxic sludge that
poisoned the entire financial system. That is
the direct lineage. It's a staggering piece of
history. Truly unbelievable. OK, so with that
in mind. Let's look at the more concrete legacy.
What actually changed in the real world because
of this? Section 5, politics, reform, and culture.
The biggest and most immediate change was a piece
of legislation called the Oil Pollution Act of
1990, OPA 90. What did that do? A few really
critical things. First, it massively increased
the penalties for spills. But most importantly,
it mandated the phase out of single hull tankers
in U .S. waters. It required all new tankers
to be built with double hulls. A simple but profound
engineering change. Incredibly simple. The Valdez
was a single layer of steel separating 53 million...
gallons of oil from the ocean. A double hull
is basically a ship within a ship. You have an
outer hull and an inner hull with a gap in between.
A built -in crumple zone. A perfect way to describe
it, if you get a gash in the outer hull like
the Valdez did, the inner hull remains intact
and keeps the oil contained. And do we know if
a double hull would have made a difference for
the Valdez? The Coast Guard did a major study
on it. Their conclusion was that a double hull
would have prevented about 60 % of the spill.
60%. That's more than 6 million gallons that
would have stayed in the ship. A massive difference.
OPA -90 also beefed up the response requirements.
Now, by law, two powerful escort tugboats have
to accompany every single tanker through Prince
William Sound. So there are helpers right there
if something goes wrong. Instantly. And OPA -90
had one other very specific, almost personal
provision. It banned any vessel that had spilled
more than a million gallons of oil from ever
reentering Prince William Sound. the Exxon Valdez
itself from ever going back. It effectively did,
yes. And Exxon actually sued the government to
try and get that provision overturned. They wanted
to keep using the ship on that route. That takes
some nerve. What happened to the ship in the
end? Oh, it had a long and very sad afterlife.
Exxon spent $30 million repairing it, but the
name was toxic, so they renamed it. First, it
was the Exxon Mediterranean. Then the Sea River
Mediterranean when they tried to rebrand their
shipping company. Then they sold it and it became
the Dongfang Ocean. And then finally, the Oriental
Nicety. It was passed around, hauling iron ore
in Asia because its reputation and the law kept
it away from most major ports. A pariah ship.
And its final fate. In 2012, 33 years after the
spill, the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez
was deliberately run aground on a scrap beach
in Alang, India, and dismantled by hand for scrap
metal. An ignominious end. A fitting one, some
might say. So the ship is gone. But what about
the social impact, especially on the native Alaskan
communities who had lived there for millennia?
The impact was devastating, and it's a part of
the story that often gets overlooked. The village
of Chenega, for example. Their population tripled
overnight with cleanup workers, media, lawyers.
Their entire way of life was shattered. And it
wasn't just a financial disruption. It was a
cultural one. Deeply. They had a subsistence
lifestyle. That doesn't mean they were poor.
It means they lived in a rich, direct relationship
with the land and the sea. They ate the fish,
the seals, the berries. And after the spill.
A deep fear took hold. Is the food safe to eat?
The clams? The salmon? Are they contaminated?
That trust, that ancient connection to their
food source was broken. And for many, it has
never been repaired. It created a kind of spiritual
sickness. This also led to this fascinating economic
concept of existence value. It did. Economists
were trying to calculate the total damage and
they had to ask. What is the dollar value of
a pristine Prince William sound to someone in,
say, Ohio, who will never visit it but is glad
to know it exists? How do you put a price tag
on the public's value for a wild, untouched place?
A very difficult question to answer. It is. And
finally, there's the pop culture footprint. The
spill became more than an event. It became a
symbol. The ultimate shorthand for corporate
negligence and environmental ruin. Absolutely.
The most famous example is probably the 1995
movie Waterworld. The big budget Kevin Costner
film. Right. The villain's ship, the base for
all the bad guys, is explicitly the Exxon Valdez.
It's rusted and decayed. And in the captain's
cabin, they have a framed portrait of Joseph
Hazelwood on the wall. They revere him as a kind
of destructive saint. That is so dark and so
specific. It shows how deeply the story penetrated
the culture. It was in Saturday Night Live sketches.
It was referenced in shows like Breaking Bad.
It became a permanent cultural touchstone. Okay,
let's try to pull all of these threads together.
This has been a huge, sprawling story. It really
has. We started with a myth. the drunk captain.
And we found the reality was a perfect storm
of systemic failures. A tired crew, a deliberately
broken radar, and a corporate culture that put
profits ahead of safety. Then we saw how the
response, especially the decision to blast the
beaches with hot water, was a well -intentioned
disaster that actually sterilized the coastline,
doing more harm than good in many places. We
followed the legal battle. which dragged on for
20 years, saw the victim's award slashed by 90%,
and in a shocking twist, gave birth to the credit
default swap, the financial weapon that helped
trigger the 2008 crisis. And we learned that
the disaster never truly ended, that thousands
of gallons of oil are still there today, preserved
like a toxic mayonnaise under the rocks of Prince
William Sound, and an entire pot of orcas is
now functionally extinct. So after all of that,
here's the final thought I want to leave you
with, a thing to really chew on. We like our
stories to have a clean timeline. A beginning,
a middle, and an end. The spill happened on March
24th, 1989. The cleanup officially ended. The
Supreme Court made its final ruling in 2008.
It feels like the book is closed. But ecosystems
and economies, they don't operate on news cycles
or court dockets. Exactly. For the herring in
Cordova, the spill is still happening every single
spring when the fishery doesn't open. For the
sea otters that dig on those beaches, the spill
is still happening. For the ghost pod of the
AT -1 orcas, the spill is still happening. So
the next time you hear on the news that a company
or a government agency has declared an environmental
cleanup complete, the question you have to ask
is, what does complete actually mean? Does it
mean the ecosystem has truly recovered its health
and complexity? Or does it just mean that the
TV cameras have gone home, the checks have been
written, and the problem is now out of sight
and therefore out of mind? Is clean a scientific
reality or is it just a public relations term?
That's the question. A very important one. Thank
you for listening to this deep dive. It's a heavy
one, but an important one. As always, stay curious.