exxon valdez oil spill case study pdf

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The Exxon Valdez Revisited: The Untold Story (A)

By: Gerry Yemen, Erika H. James

Being in charge of cleaning up the March 24, 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill accident, meant that Otto Harrison, the general manager of Exxon International Alaskan Operations, was there when the storm…

• Length: 23 page(s)
• Publication Date: Jan 24, 2006
• Discipline: General Management
• Product #: UV1436-PDF-ENG

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Being in charge of cleaning up the March 24, 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill accident, meant that Otto Harrison, the general manager of Exxon International Alaskan Operations, was there when the storm clouds over the event were thick. Despite years of learning, wisdom, growth, and dealing with success and failure, Harrison had never faced a challenge of this magnitude. He was sure his experiences would be utilized in full force. The questions he thought about included whether three different governing bodies, the state of Alaska, the federal government, and Exxon, a publicly held corporation, could work together toward a common goal-to leave few signs of the biggest oil spill ever to occur in North America. What type of help was most needed now? Would Exxon's plan satisfy the numerous stakeholders? How would the plan be viewed publicly? What impact would the cleanup plan have on Exxon's business? In the (A) case, the Exxon Valdez accident and immediate challenges are described so students can put themselves in Harrison's place to lead through the crisis. The (B) case (epilogue) outlines more problems and includes actions taken to try to clean up the oil as quickly and effectively as they could. The tragedy changed the oil industry in many ways-some of which are described in the epilogue.

Jan 24, 2006

Discipline:

General Management

Geographies:

Industries:

Agriculture sector, Chemical manufacturing, Electric power, Energy and natural resources sector, Water supply

Darden School of Business

UV1436-PDF-ENG

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Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

By: History.com Editors

Updated: March 23, 2021 | Original: March 9, 2018

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was a manmade disaster that occurred when Exxon Valdez , an oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history until the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The Exxon Valdez oil slick covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals and whales. Nearly 30 years later, pockets of crude oil remain in some locations. After the spill, Exxon Valdez returned to service under a different name, operating for more than two decades as an oil tanker and ore carrier.

On the evening of March 23, 1989, Exxon Valdez left the port of Valdez, Alaska , bound for Long Beach, California , with 53 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude oil onboard.

At four minutes after midnight on March 24, the ship struck Bligh Reef, a well-known navigation hazard in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

The impact of the collision tore open the ship’s hull, causing some 11 million gallons of crude oil to spill into the water.

At the time, it was the largest single oil spill in U.S. waters. Initial attempts to contain the oil failed, and in the months that followed, the oil slick spread, eventually covering about 1,300 miles of coastline.

Investigators later learned that Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of Exxon Valdez , had been drinking at the time and had allowed an unlicensed third mate to steer the massive ship.

In March 1990, Hazelwood was acquitted of felony charges. He was convicted of a single charge of misdemeanor negligence, fined $50,000, and ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service.

Oil Spill Cleanup

In the months after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon employees, federal responders and more than 11,000 Alaska residents worked to clean up the oil spill.

Exxon payed about $2 billion in cleanup costs and $1.8 billion for habitat restoration and personal damages related to the spill.

Cleanup workers skimmed oil from the water’s surface, sprayed oil dispersant chemicals in the water and on shore, washed oiled beaches with hot water and rescued and cleaned animals trapped in oil.

Environmental officials purposefully left some areas of shoreline untreated so they could study the effect of cleanup measures, some of which were unproven at the time. They later found that aggressive washing with high-pressure, hot water hoses was effective in removing oil, but did even more ecological damage by killing the remaining plants and animals in the process.

One of those areas that was oiled but never cleaned is a large shoreline boulder called Mearn’s Rock. Scientists have returned to Mearn’s Rock every summer since the spill to photograph the plants and small critters growing on it. They found that many of the mussels, barnacles and various seaweeds growing on the rock before the spill returned to normal levels about three to four years after the spill.

Environmental And Economic Impacts

Prince William Sound had been a pristine wilderness before the spill. The Exxon Valdez disaster dramatically changed all of that, taking a major toll on wildlife. It killed an estimated 250,000 sea birds, 3,000 otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles and 22 killer whales.

The oil spill also may have played a role in the collapse of salmon and herring fisheries in Prince William Sound in the early 1990s. Fishermen went bankrupt, and the economies of small shoreline towns, including Valdez and Cordova, suffered in the following years.

Some reports estimated the total economic loss from the Exxon Valdez oil spill to be as much as $2.8 billion.

A 2001 study found oil contamination remaining at more than half of the 91 beach sites tested in Prince William Sound.

The spill had killed an estimated 40 percent of all sea otters living in the Sound. The sea otter population didn’t recover to its pre-spill levels until 2014, twenty-five years after the spill.

Stocks of herring, once a lucrative source of income for Prince William Sound fisherman, have never fully rebounded.

READ MORE:  Water and Air Pollution

Oil Pollution Act of 1990

In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the U.S. Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which President George H.W. Bush signed into law that year.

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 increased penalties for companies responsible for oil spills and required that all oil tankers in United States waters have a double hull.

Exxon Valdez was a single-hulled tanker; a double-hull design, by making it less likely that a collision would have spilled oil, might have prevented the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Fate of Exxon Valdez

The ship, Exxon Valdez —first commissioned in 1986—was repaired and returned to service a year after the spill in a different ocean and under a different name.

The single-hulled ship could no longer transport oil in U.S. waters, due to the new regulations. The ship began running oil transport routes in Europe, where single-hulled oil tankers were still allowed. There it was renamed the Exxon Mediterranean , then the SeaRiver Mediterranean and finally the S/R Mediterranean.

In 2002, the European Union banned single-hulled tankers and the former Exxon Valdez moved to Asian waters.

Exxon sold the infamous tanker in 2008 to a Hong Kong-based shipping company. The company converted the old oil tanker to an ore carrier, renaming it the Dong Feng Ocean . In 2010, the star-crossed ship collided with another bulk carrier in the Yellow Sea and was once again severely damaged.

The ship was renamed once more after the collision, becoming the Oriental Nicety . The Oriental Nicety was sold for scrap to an Indian company and dismantled in 2012.

Exxon Valdez laid to rest; Nature . The never-ending history of life on a rock; NOAA . Economic impacts of the spill; Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council .

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Lessons Learned From the Exxon Valdez Spill

• Monitoring the Sound
• Remaining Oil
• Ecological Recovery
• Spill Response

The ultimate goal for the NOAA Prince William Sound Monitoring Program has always been to improve the way we respond to oil spills in a complex environment like Alaska's Prince William Sound.

Our goal is to use science to better understand physical and biological recovery and then apply the lessons to spill response. The insights we gain relate to both the process of environmental monitoring itself and impacts caused by the spill and cleanup. So, what have we learned?

Science Alongside Cleanup

First, it is difficult to assess the impacts from a disturbance—even a major one like the Exxon Valdez spill—in a dynamic system like Prince William Sound. The inherently high degree of natural variability found in such systems can limit or preclude the use of standard or traditional statistical methods.

So-called "set-aside sites," areas that were oiled but intentionally left uncleaned, have been critical to the NOAA monitoring program's ability to determine impacts due to oiling alone and those due to cleanup. During an oil spill, there are compelling reasons to clean up all oil; however, to monitor the recovery of shorelines, set-aside sites are key considerations. We recommend that the concept be discussed during oil spill contingency planning and again during the inevitable spill events.

Effects of the Cleanup

High-pressure, hot-water washing of shorelines , while effective at removing stranded oil, can damage plants and animals in the treated zone directly and indirectly, short-term and long-term. This might seem obvious, but before the Exxon Valdez spill there was almost no real documentation of these impacts.

We now know the negative effects of agressive shoreline cleanup methods like high-pressure, hot-water washing. However, this does not mean we would eliminate its use in the future. Hopefully, with the guidance of monitoring efforts like this one, we can employ the method in a wiser fashion.

Impacts on Habitat

Physical characteristics of the habitat determine the makeup of biological communities. Therefore, altering the physical features of a beach or shoreline can significantly affect the recovery of impacted plants or animals. Physical recovery and stabilization of a site are necessary for biological recovery.

For example, when the beach at Eleanor Island (one of our study sites) was cleaned, its silty sediments were noticeably washed out into the water. We believe that many, if not most, of the animals that normally live in this kind of beach require a certain mix of fine-grained sediments. Many would not return until the beach sediments had stabilized.

If there is a proverbial silver lining to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, it must include the fact that the incident and its aftermath represented a remarkable opportunity to learn from misfortune . Our research is but one example of the many scientific investigations in Prince William Sound that should help us to understand the environment, how it responds to oil spills and cleanup, and how we can facilitate the process of recovery—however you may choose to define that term.

More Information about the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill: Learn how the Exxon Valdez spill, while an unfortunate incident, provided a necessary impetus to reexamine the state of oil spill prevention, response, and cleanup.

Podcast: Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 20th Anniversary Special [MP3, 11 MB, 12 minutes]: NOAA's National Ocean Service talks with OR&R's senior scientist, Dr. Alan Mearns, who was involved in the initial spill response for the Exxon Valdez accident. Dr. Mearns has spent years leading a project that continues to monitor the long-term impact of the huge oil spill. (Making Waves Episode 20, March 13, 2009)

Prince William's Oily Mess: A Tale of Recovery: Read a case study of the Exxon Valdez spill, accompanied by a set of supporting resources, including student and teacher guides, an interactive quiz, an exercise with real data, and an interview with an OR&R scientist.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 20 Years Later: A NOS Scientist's Perspective [PDF, 268 KB]: Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Alan Mearns, a senior staff scientist with the Office of Response and Restoration, talks about what it was like to be involved in the initial cleanup and how different it is responding to oil spills today.

Oil Spill Recovery Institute (OSRI): Established by Congress in response to the Exxon Valdez spill, OSRI works to identify and develop the best available techniques, equipment, and materials for responding to oil spills in the Arctic and sub-Arctic marine environment.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council: This partnership was formed to oversee ecosystem restoration in Prince William Sound. Learn more about the Exxon Valdez spill, its impacts, and restoration and research efforts.

Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council: An independent non-profit organization, the Citizens' Advisory Council works to reduce pollution from crude oil transportation through Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.

Go back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill overview page.

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TROUBLE ON OILED WATERS: Lessons from the Exxon ValdezOil Spill

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was the largest in US maritime history. We review post-spill research and set it in its legal context. The Exxon Corporation, ob- viously responsible for the spill, focused on restoration, whereas the Trustees, a coalition of state and federal entities, focused on damage and its assessment. Despite billions of dollars expended, little new understanding was gained about the recovery dynamics of a high latitude marine ecosystem subject to an anthro- pogenic pulse perturbation. We discuss a variety of case studies that highlight the limitations to and shortcomings of the research effort. Given that more spills are inevitable, we recommend that future studies address spatial patterns in the intertidal, and focus on the abundances of long-lived species and on organisms that preserve a chronological record of growth. Oil spills, while tragic, represent opportunities to gain insight into the dynamics of marine ecosystems and should not be wasted.

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