eastern on american history tv. on march 24,go struckhe axon oil tanker and spilled close to 11 million gallons of crude oil. we talked to stan jones, a former investigative reporter with the anchorage daily news and author of the spill about the timeline of the disaster and the effect it had on the area. this is already minutes. -- 30 minutes. home and it at my was all over the news. by the time i got to work, i knew all about it. the first reaction was disbelief. how could this happen? the second reaction was just shocked at the enormity of it. they spilled i think 11 million gallons of oil.

and covered like 11,000 square miles of ocean before it was done. the scale was inconceivable until it happened. >> where were you working and what was your job? >> i worked for the anchorage daily news and i was a reporter at the time, primarily doing investigative work. i had covered oil before the spills. >> can you tell us what the history of the oil industry was in alaska? how will -- large was it during that time? knowe modern industry we today got its start in alaska in 1967 when there was a huge oil strike. operating inan the tankerat is when traffic began. 15 years passed before this spill. , froml industry in alaska the day oil was discovered, had

an enormous mind share in the state. d as the biggest funding for state government. for a long time, it was the only source that mattered. it produced money so fast that one of the jokes was even the alleges desk alaska legislature -- alaska legislature could not waste it all. industry was generating all of this money and it took an acute interest in politics because they are always interested in taxes. and in regulation. time, their influence over the legislature became enormous. and it was almost mandatory to be oil friendly. >> who were some of the big companies that were operating out of here? arehe big three were and

bp, exxon mobil and conocophillips. over time, the names have changed as companies merged and absorbed each other. early in the day, what is now conoco was really >>. the big three players have not changed much. the big two are bp and exxon. >> you mentioned their influence over the legislature. what does that mean for regulations, regarding oil in the state. was always an enormous battle to get any new regulation in place and the trend really ran in the opposite direction. regulations tended to get looser, not tighter. most regulation having to do federal operation were in origin and focus. the regulations having to do with cleanup were fundamentally

at the state level. that was part of the problem. regulations were a big part of the problem with the spill. the state oversight of cleanup is why the- that company that runs the system in wasce williamstown unprepared for cleanup. for the first three days or so, there was essentially no cleanup effort. -- they had three days of really good weather after that spill. they had this leg of oil spreading out from that tanker and nothing happened to clean it up. >> can we explain to the people who are watching, how does the oil process work? where does it pull from and why was it on a tanker truck and

where was it going? oil is produced on alaska's north slope. which is up in the arctic. a harsh climate, a harsh environment. permafrost country. so, it is hard to operate in. we have to be careful not to disrupt things. polar bears have to be protected. the oil industry has done a good job on that part of it. , the fields slope are -- on the north slope, it is put into a pipeline. miles south across the middle of alaska, to the port of valdez. there it is floated onto oil tankers and shipped to the u.s. west coast.

i think the exxon valdez was headed for long beach. it was carrying about 53 million gallons of oil. it lost about 20% of its cargo. and the rest is history, sadly. >> can we talk about what happened on that day? >> sure. sailed out and at 12:04 a.m. on the 24th of march, which was good friday, it hit bligh reef, which was a well marked navigational hazard in prince william sound. what happened before, earlier in the day, there had been reports of icebergs in the tanker lanes. the captain requested permission to deviate from the tanker lanes to avoid these icebergs, in case they were still there. so, it is a fairly tricky

maneuver but nothing unusual. it happened all the time. the failure was to return to the tanker lanes and the ship sailed into the reef. there were some conditions on the ship that contributed to the accident. there was always a question as to whether he was drinking and if he was, was it a factor? that was never established clearly. i doubt it myself. what he did was to put the third mate in charge of the bridge. the tanker crews, this was identified as one of the act -- factors in the accident, the size of the ships had been reduced over the years. there was a constant battle with fatigue and overwork. that was identified as a

conjuring factor. third mate was in charge of the bridge. he was not qualified to be doing what he was doing and he should not have been. it comes back to the workload and scanning this of the cruise on those tankers. all of those things regress after the spill. and were remedied. oil was this tanker carrying and how much spilled out? >> it had about 53 million gallons on board. they usually measure tanker cargoes in barrels. that was about one and a quarter million barrels. about 11 million gallons. which i think was around 250,000 barrels. the question of how much a lost has been controversial. the number i just gave you is the generally accepted figure. the reason it is hard to figure out how much oil it lost his that as the oil came out, water

came in. it was hard to get an exact measurement of how much was lost. >> you mentioned this happened in prince williamstown, where is that located and if people have visited they are, what would they have found? >> it is located on the gulf of alaska. it is a couple hundred miles south of anchorage. it is more or less in the middle of the state. this beautiful, expansive, enclosed waters with islands and peninsulas and coastlines and a rich population of seabirds and fish and animals and bears and sea otters. anyone who has visited prince williamstown has been stunned by the natural beauty. relatively untouched by man. you do not see much development at all. normally, you would see a few

fishing boats. very little touch from the hand of man. thatave this tanker followed everything in sight. and it was a shock to the conscience and to the consciousness. how could this happen? into a largepills body of water like that, what does it do to it? how fast does it travel, do we know? doese oil in and of itself not travel very fast. it floats on the top and is carried by currents. it does not tend to disburse rapidly into the water if the water is calm. if you get a storm as happened a few days after the spill, it mixes into the water. when that happens, it is a threat to fish and plankton and so on in the water. surface, --n the

after it floats, it hits the beaches and destroy the beach ecosystem -- destroys the beach ecosystem. >> when was exxon alerted that the spill had happened and when did the actual efforts to try and stop it again? well, i am sure that exxon was alerted immediately by the crew of the ship that we are leaking oil. i know for a fact that the captain of the ship got on the radio and called coast guard immediately. we are leaking some oil. he said on the radio that he was going to try and block the bow and get off the reef and proceed which was a terrifying possibility. the ship so badly damaged there

is a good chance it would have sunk or capsized if he had succeeded in doing that. he didn't so the ship stayed on the reef and continued to leak oil. began almosteffort immediately. the problem was there were so few resources and cleanup equipment available that not much could be done. so, it started from a tiny beginning and ramped up over the rest of that spring and summer. >> whose responsibility was it for the oil spill? did exxon have a plan for -- >> a response plan. >> did alaska have a response plan? >> the primary responsible deep for the rep -- response plan fell on exxon. it is carried out by a pipeline

service company. when there is a spill, alaska was responsible for the first three day of the -- days of the response effort. sent out the equipment to try to pick up the mess and prevent it from spreading. after that first three days, the speller is supposed to take over management of the response. exxon did that after a relatively short time. it was exxon running the spill. >> what is the process of cleaning up oil? what has to be done and what are some of the challenges with an oil spill of that magnitude? >> to over simple fight it, there are two aspects. one is containment, try not to .et it spread farther the second is removal. both are difficult. we had a huge area that had spilled oil on it. some of the oil immersed itself

with sand and gravel and plants and all of that kind of stuff. so, removal was very difficult. one of the responses to the spill was to use something called a dispersant. the name was? it. it.coex it was supposed to break the oil once it gets into the water, into tiny granules that can be processed by bacteria in the water. oil is an organic substance and if given enough time, nature will reprocess it into harmless things. is problem is the bacteria poisonous itself. -- the dispersant is poisonous itself. and it was an abysmal failure.

they noticed the oil in the rocks on the beach and they had two solutions to that. one of which was ridiculous and the other was devastating. the ridiculous one and there is a lot of photographs of this, they hired people to go out on the beach with paper towels and wiped the oil off the rocks. [laughter] >> yes, they did. the second thing they did was what we will do is we will get high pressure hot-water washers and we will blast these oil beaches with this hot-water and it will wash the oil back into the water and then we can actually clean it up. they may have cleaned up some oil that way. i don't think it was much but they did further damage to the ecosystem with the hot water and probably blasted some of the oil deeper into the sand. the cleanup was an abysmal failure. i think i recalled that maybe

they got 15% of the oil. that is a wild guess. nobody really knows. it is probably fair to say that for the most part, the cleanup effort was a pr effort to show america and the world that something was being done to clean up the soil. one of the exxon officials said soon after the spill that they were going to clean it all up. of course, they did not even come close. >> how far did the oil spread? >> i think the farthest oil from the exxon valdez was documented -- 12 or 1300 miles away 1200 or 1300 miles away. it came up to the south end of where anchorage is at a completely different body of water and by c. we talked a few minutes ago about who had to come up with a response plan. the primary response

ability was on the speller. all of the agencies, federal and state, they have to have their own response plans to see what they are going to do. everybody and every agency was theoretically ready. as a practical matter, none of them were. they were all on the front line immediately. had a devastating impact on the fishing economy. forr than people who worked the oil industry, fishing was the mainstay of the economy. outside valdez, it was fishing or nothing. shrimp, crabon, and after the spill, the fisheries were closed. it would have taken one oiled

salmon to hit the market in seattle to destroy the market for years to come. they shut it down and said no fishing. that was the first impact of it. it turned out that some of those populations were damaged and could not be fished for a while. herring was one and shrimp was another. the fact that fishing had been shut down and everybody was going broke forced this agonizing dilemma on the fisherman. that was should they hire their boats and crews out to axon -- exxon two help them clean up and there were some who would not do it. they could not work for exxon. there were others who could and it provoked hideous emissions and there was a derisive term for people who worked for exxon. they were called spillionaires. waslong-term result of this

real social dysfunction. that was one of the things that was intensively studied by the group i work for. were increases in every of family and social dysfunction. there was more drinking, more suicide, more divorces, more family violence. everything bad that can happen to a small industry society happen to those people in prince williamstown. >> how long did it take the cleanup until it was completed? the firstintensive in year and it continued in the summer for another year or two and was discontinued. there was not much left to do. it is worth saying that even today, there is some oil under some beaches. not a lot. just a few thousand gallons. it is a testament to the

persistence of this oil. once that oil gets below the surface, it does not degrade very fast. it has not been consumed by nature and turned into routine compounds. did congress >> -- >> did congress ever get involved? >> they did what congress does. they passed legislation's and had hearings and did investigations. the biggest ledges late of outcome -- legislative outcome was an act from 1990 which remedied a lot of defects of the exxon valdez spill. >> what were some of the key points in it that would affect oil? well, there were several. that tankersuired be escorted by two tugs all the way out of prince william sound and those tugs were not only there to assist the tanker but

they also had response equipment on. and they would be able to respond to leaking oil immediately, in theory. the other big change, which was fiercely advocated by people in , even william sound before the oil trade started, was to require double homes on oil tankers. it is exactly what it sounds like. you would have a bunch of oil in the tanker and then you had seawater. any puncture would result in an oil leak. , there are twols halls. separated by about 11 feet of airspace or gas or whatever they want.

you can get a fairly serious puncture and have no leak. it was estimated after the spill these --xxon doll theez had the double hall, size of the spill would have been dramatically less. i think it was 80%. the oil pollution act of 1990 had to haveps double halls by a certain deadline. they did make the deadline and now they all have double halls. >> does this oil spill affect the oil industry's influence in the alaska legislature? also, did alaska impose any regulations? revised andw was regulations were revised.

as far as the political climate goes, for a year or two, alaskans were down on the oil industry. it passed. it is the biggest funding source of state government. in the oile work industry. a lot of people know that the benefits they get from the state come from the money tax from the oil industry. we have the alaska permit fund which made up -- was made up entirely in part of the oil revenue. it stands at around $60 billion. the income is starting to pay for state government because oil revenues have declined as oil production has declined. to somethingut called the alaska fund dividend. the check varies in size.

was $1000,in size the highest was $2200. we know that it comes from oil money, basically. the fund came from oil money. oil and saying earlier, the oil industry has this tremendous mind share in alaska. at times, it is definitely a love-hate relationship. a lot of people hated the oil industry because of that spill. a lot of them still do because of the way it controls our politics. a badct is it is like marriage. --terry of. this to the bp oil spill off the coast of louisiana. were there any similarities and they learn anything from what had happened in alaska? >> there were no real parallels

in the operational since. what was similar for us alaskans watching from afar with the fact that the oil industry was caught flat-footed. i'm sure they had all kinds of plans to keep that from happening and plans to deal with it when it did happen, but did any of it work? no. that we'll got loose and spread. what was very familiar entry considerable extent, the same as here, was the impact on communities that live along the coast of the gulf, especially the fishing communities. after that still, a lot of people from the area came up here to look at what we had done in having a mechanism to give citizens a voice in how the oil industry operates in these areas. demo condo spell was much larger than the exxon valdez.

as i recall, the flow just went on for day after day. whereas, the exxon valdez was a one and done in. >> -- isn't. >> -- event. >> do you think the oil industry has learned its lesson in the exxon valdez? >> yes and no. in the immediate aftermath, they did respond. i make no judgment after the sincerity of their is once. -- response. the attention of the public will turn to other matters, but the attention of the oil industry on the issue of getting lighter regulations, never waned there will always be there and always be doing that. capitalismying about that is not quite as damming as it may sound. capitalism is a moral --

ammoral, it has no soul in the conscious. cost -- is to maximize minimize costs and maximize revenue. 12 forism is a wonderful increasing economic efficiency -- tool for increasing economic efficiency, but it comes with a whole set of risk. what society must never do is forget that it is up to society to set the rules under which capitalism operates. in itselfcapitalism, has no soul and no morality. it will do what it has to to make money. again, it's up to society to never let up because when we do, we get exxon abilities. -- exxon valdez. on march 24,go,

1989, the exxon valdez oil tanker struck a reef in alaska's prince william sound and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil. george h.w. bush was president at the time. heldd several cap members a briefing to give an update on the government's response. taking questions from reporters are defense secretary dick cheney, samuel skinner and william reilly carried this portion is a -- william reilly. this portion is about 25 minutes. statement and will be glad to take a few questions and then refer them to our experts here. virtually every american is familiar with the tragic environmental disaster in alaskan waters. and more than ten million gallons of oil have been spilled with deadly results for wildlife and hardship for local citizens. we all share the sorrow and