TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072489/07248900.010

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 27KB | 505 lines

                                                                                ENVIRONMENT, Page 42

COVER STORY: Joe's Bad Trip


A TIME investigation of the Exxon Valdez fiasco finds that not
only the tanker's captain is to blame for the worst oil spill
in U.S. history

By Richard Behar


    A rather unique way to renew old acquaintances -- I can
certainly think of more pleasant and certainly less
"newsworthy" ways to do it, though.

    These days, after much of the media hype and lunacy has
abated, (I am) left simply with a gut feeling of frustration.
Had to learn the hard way the lexicon of the 80's and discover
exactly what "spin" means. The truth hasn't been allowed to come
to the fore either for any number of legal reasons or it wasn't
lurid enough for print or airing.

    Oh well, I'll get my day(s) in court soon enough and the
cause (of the oil spill) will seem pretty mundane and simple
after all...

    -- Joseph Hazelwood (in a letter to a friend, May 2, 1989)


    When Captain Joseph Hazelwood heads for the mailbox these
days, he no longer waves to his neighbors in Huntington Bay,
N.Y. Instead, his head sagging, he hurries back indoors to the
lonely anguish that has engulfed his life since the early
morning of March 24, when his tanker, the Exxon Valdez, struck
a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and leaked 11 million
gal. of crude oil into the pristine waters.

    Since then, Hazelwood has been a man under siege. Not long
after the accident, a TV reporter beat him to the mailbox and
rifled through his letters until neighbors chased her away.
Other journalists have surrounded his home, flashing cameras
through windows and banging on doors. Still others have stolen
bags of garbage from the curb. Then there are the sneers of
strangers, the steady stream of Hazelwood songs and jokes, the
death threats to his family from anonymous callers, some of whom
promise to blow the pretty yellow house to smithereens. Whatever
respite Hazelwood may have enjoyed as the story faded from the
front pages probably ended last week, when the crippled Exxon
Valdez, on its way for repairs, caused an 18-mile-long oil slick
off San Diego. Suddenly the tanker was thrust back into the
headlines.

    Fired from Exxon in March in the wake of the Alaska
disaster, Hazelwood, 42, is discovering how America treats those
it deems to be villains. Newspapers and late-night comics had
a field day with early press reports depicting a boozy Hazelwood
leaving the bridge of the 987-ft. tanker and turning control
over to an unqualified mate. SKIPPER WAS DRUNK, screamed the New
York Post. "I was just trying to scrape some ice off the reef
for my margarita," chortled comedian David Letterman, suggesting
one of Hazelwood's "Top Ten Excuses" for the spill.

    But doubts have arisen about many of the purported facts
surrounding the spill and the role of Hazelwood, who faces up
to twelve years in prison if convicted of the criminal charges
pending against him in Alaska. A two-month TIME investigation
of the accident has unveiled a wider web of accountability in
which Exxon and the Coast Guard appear to share some of the
blame for the worst oil disaster in U.S. history. As the
Valdez's captain, Hazelwood will bear the ultimate
responsibility for the spill. But whether he was drunk or sober,
his actions were not the only cause of the accident. The fiasco
resulted from a confluence of breakdowns, both individual and
organizational. The major findings of TIME's investigation:

    Nearly four months after the spill, there is no proof that
Hazelwood was drunk when his ship ran aground. In fact, his
crewmates claim he was not. A test given about ten hours after
the grounding found that his blood-alcohol level was a little
more than half the 0.1% drunk-driving limit set by the state of
Alaska and 50% higher than the 0.04% limit set by the Coast
Guard for seamen operating a moving ship. Some toxicologists
have suggested that Hazelwood may have had a severely high 0.22%
blood-alcohol level when the ship struck the reef. A more
plausible theory is that he was drinking in the hours after the
accident occurred.

    Aside from the question of Hazelwood's drinking, there is
a dispute over the key issue of the Valdez accident: Was Third
Mate Gregory Cousins qualified to be in control of the vessel
as it headed out of the sound? Though the Coast Guard
emphatically stated after the wreck that Cousins was not so
qualified, the matter is far murkier. Federal regulations
governing "pilotage endorsements" in the sound have been altered
so often that Cousins may have met the standard that was in
force at the time. Shortly before the accident, Congress was
considering legislation that would have eased federal pilotage
requirements in the sound.

    Despite early criticism of Hazelwood's conduct, the Coast
Guard maintains that his handling of the ship after it ran
aground was exemplary. Not only did he help prevent the oil
spill from being even worse, but his actions may have saved
lives as well. By adjusting the engine power, the captain was
able to keep the vessel stable and pressed firmly against the
reef.

    Sharp cuts in the size of the tanker's crew had left the
Valdez shorthanded, contributing to fatigue that may have helped
cause the accident.

    Although Exxon claims that it thoroughly monitored
Hazelwood after he voluntarily sought treatment for alcoholism,
the company repeatedly missed signs that he had continued
drinking heavily. Moreover, Exxon supplied low-alcohol beer to
tanker crewmen despite its policy of banning drinking aboard its
ships.

    Hazelwood is in the fight of his life because he is an
alcoholic. "Incidents in Joe's life that involve alleged
alcohol abuse only poison the atmosphere," complains one of his
lawyers, Thomas Russo. "They make people assume that alcohol
played a role in the grounding, when it didn't." Drinking has
been an important part of Hazelwood's life since his college
days, but it did not impede a rapid rise to the top of Exxon's
seafaring ranks. Hazelwood long seemed to believe that nothing
bad could befall him. As the ironic motto printed next to his
picture in his college yearbook put it, "It can't happen to me."

    Known as Jeff until his Exxon days, Hazelwood seemed
destined for a career at sea from an early age. One of four
children of a veteran Pan Am pilot, he was born in Hawkinsville,
Ga., in 1946, then moved with his family to a new neighborhood
in Huntington, Long Island, popular with young airline captains
and their families. "If there were any problems, Jeff and I
certainly felt isolated from them," says a boyhood chum, Martin
Rowley. "Ours were perfect childhoods." Hazelwood's father was
a stickler for discipline who permitted no drinking in his home.

    Hazelwood's special joy -- and gift -- was sailing. Fellow
members of the Sea Scouts, an advanced Boy Scout group for
teenagers, remember with awe the time they were sailing a
65-ft. schooner across Long Island Sound, and a violent storm
blew out the mainsail. "Some of the boys were crying or
vomiting," recalls one sailor, but Hazelwood volunteered to
climb the 50-ft. mast to haul in the sail and its hardware.
"Jeff related to sailing like a pro golfer who swings a club for
the first time," recalls Sea Scout Ralph Naranjo, who today runs
a local yacht club. "He had a real feeling for the vessel."

    In 1964 Hazelwood entered the New York Maritime College at
Fort Schuyler, a state-run school in the Bronx whose academic
program and military protocol were so demanding that 60% of its
students dropped out before graduating. It was at "the Fort"
that he began to drink, on weekend revels with cadets escaping
the rigors of noon military drills, the hazing of freshmen, and
outright bans on civilian clothes, on-campus drinking, even
marriage. No one partied with more fervor than Hazelwood and his
buddies on the Trolls, the school's lacrosse team. Says W. Bryce
Laraway, a fellow Troll and former roommate of Hazelwood's: "On
a scale of 1 to 10, we were probably a 14 in terms of drinking.
We made the movie Animal House look like amateur work."

    Laraway recalls that he, Hazelwood and several other cadets
would each routinely down a case of beer on Saturdays at the
Long Island home of cadet Saunders Jones, today a sea captain
who remains Hazelwood's closest friend. By early evening the
boys would turn up at local Huntington bars. By midnight, having
rounded up as many as 50 other merrymakers, they would shift the
party back to Jones' house, where the drinking would resume on
Sundays.

    On one occasion, Hazelwood and Laraway got so drunk that
they made believe Laraway's convertible Volkswagen was a
skateboard. Driving down a steep road, they switched off the
engine, leaped into the back and shifted their weight to try to
steer the vehicle. During yet another inebriated escapade,
Laraway's speeding car flipped over completely on a Long Island
highway but landed on its wheels. Only later did they notice
that the car's backseat was missing.

    Despite such moments of boozy abandon, Hazelwood had a
reputation, at least among the Trolls, for knowing when to
stop. "Jeff seemed to have more common sense than the rest of
us, and he could control his drinking," Laraway recalls. "He was
the quiet one who didn't go far enough to get into trouble."

    Hazelwood was one of a select group of around 15 classmates
chosen to work for Esso, as Exxon was then called. As a third
mate, he earned $24,000, extraordinary pay for a young man
starting out in 1968. Hazelwood, who by then preferred to be
called Joe, reported for duty on the Esso Florence in
Wilmington, N.C. His seafaring instincts made an instant
impression. "Joe had what we old-timers refer to as a seaman's
eye," recalls Steve Brelsford, a retired Exxon captain and
Hazelwood's first boss. "He had that sixth sense about seafaring
that enables you to smell a storm on the horizon or watch the
barometer and figure how to outmaneuver it." Because of such
gifts, Hazelwood rose swiftly through the ranks. Only ten years
after graduating, he became a captain, in charge of the Exxon
Philadelphia, a California-to-Alaska oil tanker. At 32 he was
the youngest skipper in Exxon's fleet.

    But, though fellow seamen insist it did not seem to impair
his performance, Hazelwood began to drink heavily on board, in
violation of company rules. Moreover, he was not discreet about
his growing problem, and invited fellow crew members to join
him. "It was almost like Joe was trying to get caught," says a
fellow seaman who remains a close friend. "He'd close his door,
but everyone knew what went on. He always said that everything
was fine, but then why was he drinking? The guy was begging for
help, but he kept it all inside."

    Even as Hazelwood's reputation as a boozer grew, so did his
image as the best captain in Exxon's fleet. Exxon management,
however, was increasingly unhappy with the talented young
skipper, less for his drinking than because of his headstrong,
independent manner. Like the old-time captains he modeled
himself after, Hazelwood shunned paperwork, company politics and
extensive contacts with the M.B.A. executives who were
increasingly chipping away at the traditional authority of
shipmasters. "Joe didn't have Exxon tattooed under his eyelids,"
says a high-ranking Exxon engineer. "He'd make his own judgments
and act accordingly. That's why those at sea respected him and
those on land thought he wasn't a company man."

    Exxon refuses to discuss Hazelwood, including stories about
his ship-handling feats. In 1985, for instance, Hazelwood was
captain of the Exxon Chester, an asphalt carrier, as it headed
from New York to South Carolina. Offshore of Atlantic City the
ship ran into a freak storm. High winds snapped the ship's mast,
and it toppled, along with the ship's radar and electronics
gear. With 30-ft. waves and 50-knot winds overpowering the
vessel, several sailors grabbed life jackets and prepared to
abandon ship. But Hazelwood calmed the crew and rigged a
makeshift antenna. After radioing shore, he guided the Chester
out of the storm. Then, with the safety of his crew and cargo
in mind, Hazelwood followed the storm back to New York -- and,
to his surprise, ran into a brief storm of criticism from
dollar-conscious superiors at Exxon who had wanted Hazelwood to
continue the journey southward.

    By the mid-1980s, however, Hazelwood's drinking problem had
become so obvious that seamen on other Exxon ships knew of it.
"Ever since I had known of Joe, I heard he had alcohol
problems," says James Shiminski, an Exxon chief mate until 1986.
"He had a reputation for partying, ashore and on the ship." In
1984, while off duty, Hazelwood was arrested for drunken driving
in Huntington, and later convicted. Police say he was leaving
a parking lot of a tavern where he had been attending a bachelor
party for his brother Joshua, when his van smashed into a car.
Hazelwood left the scene of the accident, only to be arrested
by police in his own driveway.


    Nine months later, he was confronted by his boss and close
friend, Captain Mark Pierce, an Exxon supervisor in Baytown,
Texas. He urged Hazelwood to seek treatment before he "got into
trouble." In April 1985 he entered a 28-day alcohol
rehabilitation program at a Long Island hospital. A doctor at
the time found the skipper "depressed and demoralized."

    But Hazelwood did not win his battle with the bottle. Not
long after he left the hospital, he was reinstated as the
skipper of the Yorktown, an oil tanker that ran along the East
Coast. Friends say that being closer to home helped him dry out.
He regularly attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in
Huntington right up through 1988, but the sessions were often
jammed with up to 90 alcoholics at a time. "The place was a
social club," complains a former participant who remembers
Hazelwood. "Only about ten or 15 people ever had a chance to
talk." That seems to have suited Hazelwood, who had always been
reticent about his feelings. Last year he and his wife Suzanne,
whom he married in 1969 (they have one daughter), were on the
verge of divorce. In September Hazelwood was again arrested and
convicted for drunken driving, and his license was revoked.

    The fact was that Hazelwood had resumed drinking heavily,
but the return to old habits had somehow escaped Exxon's notice.
In a letter to a Senate investigating committee, Exxon chairman
L.G. Rawl stated that from the time Hazelwood returned to work
after his rehabilitation, he "was the most closely scrutinized
individual in the company." According to Exxon, in keeping with
company policy designed to encourage employees with
substance-abuse problems to volunteer for treatment, he was not
penalized but closely monitored. Rawl claims that Exxon
supervisors paid an average of two visits a month to Hazelwood
for two years after his hospital stay, followed by regular
observations after he was transferred to the Valdez in 1987.

    Nobody has emerged, however, to claim that Hazelwood ever
drank heavily aboard the Valdez; in fact, his management of the
ship won the praise of superiors. Both in 1987 and 1988 the
Valdez was singled out for a prestigious company award for
"safety and performance." Nevertheless, he was increasingly
disillusioned with his career, largely for reasons ranging from
longer work hours and frozen pay levels to the growing
powerlessness of captains to make their own judgments. A week
before the oil spill, Hazelwood told a friend that he was
thinking about taking a job as a harbor pilot on the Columbia
River in Oregon.

    Now Hazelwood may never command anything bigger than the
16-ft. catamaran sitting in his backyard. His future hinges
entirely on what an Alaskan jury decides took place on the night
of March 23. Was Hazelwood drunk? He has admitted drinking just
two beers over a five-hour period in the town of Valdez before
boarding the ship. At least one barmate, Radio Electronics
Officer Joel Roberson, contends that Hazelwood was drinking a
"clear" beverage that was probably vodka. Still, his companions
agree that Hazelwood did not consume an excessive amount of
alcohol while ashore.

    Before boarding, Hazelwood wired Easter flowers to his wife
and their 13-year-old daughter Alison, a junior high school
honor student. Once aboard, he went to his quarters, where he
says he drank two bottles of Moussy, a beerlike beverage
containing about 0.5% alcohol that had been stocked aboard the
Valdez. After the spill, two empty bottles were found in his
room.

    The ship was ordered to set sail for California at 9 p.m.,
an hour before schedule. Squeezed for time, Hazelwood made
several trips from the bridge to his cabin, say his attorneys,
to labor over the cumbersome paperwork that had increasingly
become his duty because of crew cutbacks. He returned to the
bridge at roughly 11:15 p.m., shortly before the state's harbor
pilot, following routine, departed from the ship at Rocky Point.
Soon thereafter Hazelwood radioed the Coast Guard to say he
would move the vessel from the outbound shipping lane to the
inbound shipping lane to avoid ice. It was the last maneuver of
Hazelwood's Exxon career.

    At approximately 11:50 Hazelwood turned over control of the
vessel to Third Mate Cousins. Second Mate Lloyd LeCain, who was
exhausted and asleep, was supposed to relieve Cousins, but the
third mate had told him to take his time. In any case,
Hazelwood ordered Cousins to make a right turn back into the
outbound lanes when the vessel reached a navigational point near
Busby Island, three miles north of Bligh Reef. The captain then
returned to his cabin, just 15 ft. and one stairway from the
bridge, reportedly to complete his paperwork.

    What happened after that remains fuzzy. The ship's log
shows the vessel passing Busby Island at 11:55 p.m., when
Cousins told Hazelwood by phone that he was starting to turn.
But the ship's course recorder shows that the Valdez did not
start to change direction until seven minutes later. Next, the
lookout on duty ran into the ship's pilothouse to report that
a flashing red buoy near Bligh Reef, which should have been
visible on the port (left) side, had been spotted on the
starboard (right) side.

    The Valdez was not responding well to Cousins' order to
turn. One reason may be that the helmsman, Robert Kagan, feeling
that the Valdez was turning too sharply back toward the outbound
lanes, used a counter-rudder maneuver to slow the swing.
Initially, Kagan acknowledged making such a maneuver, but he has
since retracted the statement in Government hearings. A
counter-rudder maneuver, however, is registered in the ship's
course recorder. Whatever the reason for the ship's
unresponsiveness, Cousins repeated the order and then followed
it with another command for a hard-right rudder.

    It was too late. "We are in trouble," Cousins told
Hazelwood over the phone. Moments earlier, the captain had felt
the first shock of his ship -- and his career -- hitting the
rocks. Hazelwood bolted onto the bridge, slowed the engines and
took other steps to keep the ship from sliding off the reef.

    Coast Guard investigator Mark Delozier, who climbed aboard
the Valdez more than three hours after the accident, says he
found a "very intense" smell of alcohol on Hazelwood's breath.
But Delozier also says Hazelwood did not appear intoxicated or
impaired. "He was very professional," he says. "He didn't appear
to be at a loss of any capabilities." No one who was aboard the
Valdez has contradicted Delozier.

    Beyond the issue of Hazelwood's sobriety, there is the
question of whether Cousins was qualified to be in charge of the
ship while it was in Prince William Sound. The answer hinges on
"pilotage endorsement," a certification from the Coast Guard
that entitles a licensed officer to steer ships in certain
federal waters. In 1977, when the Alaska pipeline opened, such
approval was required all the way down to the entrance of Prince
William Sound -- past Rocky Point, Busby Island and Bligh Reef.
But since then, the rules have been liberalized several times.

    In 1986 the Coast Guard, anticipating that Congress would
soon ease the rules, issued a directive stating that, provided
visibility exceeded two miles, pilotage endorsements were no
longer mandatory after a vessel passed a certain point in the
sound. But the point at which the new rule applied is unclear.
The Coast Guard argues that only certified officers could
command ships down to the Bligh Reef area, where the Valdez ran
aground. Hazelwood's attorneys insist that the point of freedom
was the established pilot station at Rocky Point, some seven
miles north of the reef. Hazelwood's position appears to be
bolstered by a 1986 memo from Alaska Maritime Agencies, a Valdez
shipping agency that serviced Exxon. That memo states that the
Coast Guard had waived pilotage requirements from the pilot
station to the sound's entrance.

    The Coast Guard's commandant, Admiral Paul Yost Jr., has
done little to clarify the pilotage issue. In June he declared
in a speech at a federal maritime academy that Cousins was
"fully qualified" to pilot the vessel. But in an interview with
TIME, Yost hedged his statement by saying Cousins "was
competent, but he was not technically qualified."

    Another question is why the Coast Guard did not monitor the
Valdez after it veered outside normal shipping lanes. Following
the last radio transmission by Hazelwood, the Coast Guard did
not communicate with the Valdez until after the grounding,
nearly an hour later. Nor did it track the tanker by radar. The
Coast Guard has cited possible weather conditions, poor
equipment and the change-of-shift preoccupations of a watchman
to explain why the ship was not picked up on radar. More
important, although seamen insist they rely heavily on Coast
Guard monitoring in the entire sound, Coast Guard officials
maintain they are not technically required to track ships as far
as Bligh Reef.

    Once the Valdez had run aground, however, the Coast Guard
says it had no trouble spotting the stricken tanker on radar
because it presented a wider profile and was standing higher in
water. Many mariners dismiss the Coast Guard's explanation.
"That's a ridiculous contention because any way you turn this
vessel, it's as big as a building," says Michael Chalos, a
maritime attorney who represents Hazelwood. "She has a beam of
166 ft. and a height from the waterline of about 75 ft. when
fully loaded. The Coast Guard is trying to cover up for the fact
that they were not properly monitoring her movements."

    The fatigue of the Valdez crew also appears to have played
a role in the grounding. Personnel cutbacks throughout the
merchant-marine fleet have resulted in fewer sailors working
longer hours. When Hazelwood began with Exxon in 1968, as many
as 40 sailors worked on ships smaller than the Valdez. But on
the Valdez's maiden voyage in 1986, it sailed with a crew of 24.
On Hazelwood's last journey, the crew had been cut to a
bare-bones staff of 20 and was going to be trimmed to 15 in
order to reduce costs further. As a consequence,
twelve-to-14-hour workdays became routine. Exxon maintains that
computerized systems enable its vessels to operate with smaller
crews.

    If Second Mate LeCain had climbed out of bed before the
accident to replace Third Mate Cousins, the Valdez might also
have got a more competent helmsman. Thanks in part to the high
turnover of Exxon crews, Kagan, the helmsman on duty at the time
of the accident, had been promoted to able seaman just one year
earlier from his job as room steward and food server in the
ship's galley. Kagan "does the best he can, but you have to
watch him," a deck officer later told Government investigators.
Knowing this, LeCain had planned to replace Kagan with another
helmsman once he reported for duty.

    After the spill, Hazelwood became a marked man. He flew
home to Huntington Bay, shaved his beard to change his
appearance, and was promptly arrested. In court an assistant
district attorney called him "the architect of an American
tragedy," and a state supreme court judge compared the damage
from the spill to the destruction of Hiroshima. Hazelwood was
held overnight in a lockup with more than 50 other prisoners,
many of them accused or convicted murderers, armed robbers and
drug dealers. When his cellmates learned that his bond had been
set at $1 million (and bail at $500,000), they broke into
laughter and shook their heads in disbelief. The next day
another state supreme court justice ruled that the bail was
"unconstitutionally excessive," and reduced it to $25,000.

    Hazelwood is a free man today, at least until his trial,
now scheduled to begin in October. He spends much of his time
lobster fishing in Huntington Bay with a friend in order to earn
money. The work is filthy, but it helps keep Hazelwood's mind
off his new role as America's Environmental Enemy No. 1. It will
probably be 1990 before Exxon and the National Transportation
Safety Board release their reports on the Valdez spill.
Meanwhile, late-night comics continue to rip into the skipper,
and several songs about a drunken Hazelwood play on Alaskan
radio stations. Not long ago, a businessman called Hazelwood to
ask permission to market a novelty item called Ole Hazelwood --
a liquor bottle filled with oil and water.

    Can Hazelwood endure all this attention and ridicule? Some
friends fear the worst. "Private people are not prepared to be
torn apart like this under the public microscope," warns
Colorado physician Eugene O'Neill, an old friend of Hazelwood's.
"I've seen patients on the verge of suicide over things like
this. How much longer are we going to prey on this human being?"

    Hazelwood has had no public comment on the accident except
for a terse statement that was released by his lawyers. "I feel
terrible about the effects of the spill," it reads, "but I'm
just an ordinary fellow caught up in an extraordinary situation
-- a situation which I had little control over." In fact,
Hazelwood is no ordinary fellow, and one could argue that he
should have exercised much more control over many aspects of his
life. But those are not reasons to rush to judgment about the
events that led to the fiasco in Prince William Sound.


-- Scott Brown/Valdez