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A local pilot steered the tanker out of the port of Valdez. Once he had departed from the ship, Hazelwood left the bridge and went to his cabin while the vessel was still moving along the jagged shores of Prince William Sound. That was in violation of Exxon policy, which calls for the captain to keep command until the ship is on the open ocean. Hazelwood turned over the steering of the ship to Third Mate Gregory Cousins, who is not licensed by the Coast Guard to pilot a vessel through Alaskan coastal waters.
To dodge icebergs that were floating in the sound, Cousins asked the Coast Guard station in Valdez for permission to switch from the path taken by outgoing vessels to the one used by incoming ships. The Coast Guard gave its O.K. but then lost radar contact with the ship. The local newspaper, the Valdez Vanguard, reported that the Coast Guard two years ago replaced its radar with a less powerful unit. Had it maintained contact, the Coast Guard could have warned Cousins that he was straying close to the dangerous rocks of Bligh Reef.
For 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."
According to William Woody, an 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.
The 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 magnitude would occur. Catastrophic events of this nature are further reduced because the majority of tankers calling on Port Valdez are of American registry and all of these are piloted by licensed masters or pilots."