“In 35 years as a ship’s master, no shipping company has ever told me to do anything foolish or unsafe to meet deadlines… What they do is hand you a schedule. They know pretty close to the hour how long it should take to complete a voyage, and if you consistently take much longer than that, they’ll just find someone else who will mee their expectations.”
-Captain Robert Elsensohn, a veteran skipper for Exxon, testimony during the Alaska Oil Spill Commission (ASOC) hearings.
The Exxon Valdez disaster was the product of a political environment of deregulation and privatization, which hindered the regulatory capabilities of the government and allowed oil corporations to self-regulate. Under this system, Exxon and Alyeska constantly disregarded navigation procedures, contingency planning recommendations, and other important safety protocols designed to minimize human error and mitigate the impacts of oil spills. While disregarding such protocols enabled oil corporations to increase their profit margins, it substantially increased the risk of oil spills and tanker accidents in the Prince William Sound Gulf.
The inadequacies of the oil transportation system in the region can be traced back to the late 1970s, where the oil industry under the guise of free market economics successfully challenged essential Alaskan laws that were designed to mitigate the risk of tanker accidents. In 1976, a year before the opening of the Valdez oil terminal, the Alaskan legislature passed a number of laws that granted state regulatory authorities the ability to regulate and enforce the cleanup equipment, navigation, operation certification, inspection, consistency plans and other essential features of oil tanker navigating through the region. As the ASOC investigation report concluded, under the 1976 Alaskan law the Exxon Valdez tanker would have been required to be equipped with a double-hulled bottom, its crew would have been prohibited from working more than 10 hours shifts with mandated rest periods and the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company to be equipped with twice the cleanup equipment that they had during the disaster––provisions that could have prevented the grounding of Exxon Valdez (Haycox, 228). Yet, in 1979, the oil industry successfully challenged the constitutionality of these laws in federal court (Chevron U.S.A, Inc v. Hammond), invalidating important provision of the law and making the local regulatory agencies “virtually powerless to enforce in many areas” (ASOC, 59). In the aftermath of this decision, much of the responsibility regarding safety and cleanup protocols were placed on the shoulders of operating companies, such as Exxon and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company.
This created a problem because Exxon, and other oil companies operated with a double standard. While on paper they often agreed to abide with safety protocols, in practice they often took short cuts and bypassed safety standards in order to drive up profits. This double standard was clearly seen by the manner in which the Exxon Valdez operated in the night of the accident. For instance, when the tanker encountered floating ice, the ship changed navigation lanes in order to avoid “losing time,” instead of slowing down and navigating through the ice in a reduced speed, as both the company and state law required (ASOC, 59). Furthermore, prior to the accident, Captain Hazelwood handed control of the ship to an unqualified third mate and then left the bridge going straight into his cabin without ensuring that his commands had been executed––two actions that violated both U.S. Coast Guard regulations and company policy. While Exxon attributed these decisions to Hazelwood’s negligence and possible intoxication, they were likely the byproduct of Exxon’s economic incentives––incentives that encouraged tankers to operate at the lowest cost, with the smallest crew, and with the quickest port turnaround. As the ASOC report concluded, the shipping industry has “implied pressures to meet deadlines of its own making,” pressure that “may not always be spoken” but are “a fact of life” (ASOC, 50). Under these pressures, tanker captains, such as Hazelwood, often disregarded safety protocols because if they didn’t then “they’ll [Exxon] just find someone else who will meet their expectations” (ASOC, 50).
The inadequacies of the Alyeska Pipeline’s cleanup response were also the product of deregulation and a lack of governmental oversight. In the years leading up to the disaster, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had repeatedly voiced major concerns about Alyeska’s contingency plans––plans that laid out the company’s spill clean-up protocols. For instance, in 1984, Dan Lawn, the DEC’s district officer supervisor in Valdez, wrote an official report that cited 18 major problems with the Alyeska’s contingency plan, including having outdated and insufficient oil spill recovery equipment, insufficiently trained personnel, and questionable equipment reliability. Many of the issues listed by the DEC report directly contributed to Alyeska’s delayed response during the Exxon Valdez oil spill (ASOC, 65). Yet, even though contingency plans were the primary way in which state agencies could ensure that corporations were prepared to deal with oil spill, the safety recommendations of the DEC and other governmental agencies were often ignored (ASOC, 51). After Lawn sent his 1984 report to Alyeska and threatened to shut down the terminal if these problems were not fixed, the majority of the issues listed in the report were never fixed. While the DEC was aware of Alyeska’s lack of compliance, they lacked the necessary leverage to force Alyeska to enact their safety recommendations. As the former DEC Commissioner Bill Ross concluded, if the enforcement policy “has as its only option the nuclear one,” then “it’s not a very good enforcement policy” because “shutting down the pipeline was never a real option” (ASOC, 79).
When writing about the Bhopal gas disaster, Rob Nixon concluded in the run up to the gas leak Union Carbide, “under the cover of a free market ideology,” had “slashed safety procedures and supervisory staff in an effort to staunch hemorrhaging profits.” This trend can also be seen in the Exxon Valdez disaster, where Exxon, Alyeska, and other corporations that were not caught, “slashed safety procedures” by ignoring navigation rules and contingency planning recommendation in order to “staunch hemorrhaging profits.” Just like Union Carbide, Exxon and Alyeska were able to do such things because they operated in a system where deregulation and privatization were the norm.