Exxon Valdez slinks towards the end of the line

Exxon Valdez slinks towards the end of the line

The story of the oil tanker SeaRiver Mediterranean ends, it seems, in the same inglorious cliche that besets most ships in merchant marine. Too expensive to sail on, it was pulled from service late last month and anchored off some forgotten coastline in East Asia, perhaps to die.

But the SeaRiver Mediterranean is more than just another doomed merchant ship; it is perhaps the most infamous commercial vessel ever to fly the Stars and Stripes - or any flag.


At least, it was in 1989, when it was still named the Exxon Valdez.

After 12 unremarkable years hauling oil between ports in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the ship that once spilled 50million litres of crude onto the Alaskan coast was mothballed last month and prepared for retirement.

Emptied of cargo, fuel, supplies and anything flammable or perishable, it is anchored off a foreign port that its owners will not name, in a state of deep "lay-up" awaiting its fate.

The changing economy and a lifetime ban from the Alaskan oil trade have finally overwhelmed the notorious vessel, and it is a multi-billion-dollar headache that its owners are no longer willing to bear and would rather forget.

The final hours aboard its bridge before the tanker ran aground might well be the most studied and debated period of seamanship in the history of buoyancy, with claims of alcohol use, sleep deprivation, criminal incompetence and general idiocy all getting a full venting.

This much is not in dispute: the Exxon Valdez left the ship- ping channels in Prince William Sound to avoid ice, never turned back and at 12.04am on March 24, 1989 - Good Friday - its flat bottom ground slowly and powerfully onto a rocky bulge called Bligh Reef.

Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who had turned control over to his third mate, returned to the bridge and hailed the Coast Guard with a now famous message.

"We've fetched up hard aground. We're leaking some oil, and we're going to be here for a while."

To maintain stability and minimise the potential damage of a collision, supertankers such as the Exxon Valdez do not carry oil in one giant compartment, but rather in connected tanks running the length of the ship.

The grounding was so severe, however, that it ripped open eight of the ship's 11 tanks. Three other Exxon ships arrived to pump out the remaining oil, recovering 120 million litres. The rest - 50million litres - was lost into the waters of Prince William Sound.

As large as it was, the spill does not rank among the top 50 by most estimates. But in terms of the damage caused to the coastline, the wildlife, local fishing industries and the reputation of a big US energy company, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez is without rival.

"That ship is an obvious icon for the environmental movement, and was really the trigger for a lot of progressive thinking about the environment and corporate responsibility," said Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace USA.

"We'd like to see that ship off the waters because we'd like to see any old ship retired, but the issues are much larger now than just the Exxon Valdez."

The ship was floated off the reef, and temporary repairs were made. Then, under its own power and ringed by tugboats, it limped down the Pacific Coast towards the San Diego shipyard where it had been built.

The Valdez was renamed Exxon Mediterranean before it left the yard, then dubbed SeaRiver Mediterranean in 1993, when Exxon spun off its vessel operations to a subsidiary, SeaRiver Maritime Inc.

From leaving the shipyard in 1990 until its lay-up last month, the ship made about 190 voyages around the world, and controversy always seemed to find it.

Every few years, as the ship sailed between foreign ports, another newspaper or TV station would "discover" the ship's past and a protest would materialise.

But none of the ship's enemies did more damage to the vessel than the US Congress, which banned the ship from returning to Prince William Sound.

"If I had my way it would never come back," Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska said at the time. It never did.

The Baltimore Sun

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