ENVIRONMENT, Page 42COVER STORY: Joe's Bad TripA TIME investigation of the Exxon Valdez fiasco finds that notonly the tanker's captain is to blame for the worst oil spill inU.S. historyBy 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
