Are you old enough, like me, to remember the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, a disastrous oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989?
Here's some important info about that event from Greg Palast...
"Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable of the Drunken Captain"
The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giant breaking their promises, cynically and disastrously, in the 15 years leading up to the spill.
As for Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar.
But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.
Today, three decades after the oil washed over the Alaskan beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.
The Fable of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.
