Captain Closely Monitored, Exxon Official Says

Tanker Capt. Joseph Hazelwood’s recovery from alcohol dependency was so closely monitored by Exxon officials that he began to feel that he “was the most scrutinized employee in our company,” Exxon Shipping Co. President Frank Iarossi told federal investigators Thursday.

Iarossi said two of Hazelwood’s supervisors met him at least twice a month, usually at port calls in California, to “observe him and discuss his problems.”

Iarossi, whose company fired Hazelwood after he failed sobriety tests in the hours after the Exxon Valdez ran aground March 24 in Prince William Sound, spilling more than 11 million gallons of oil, told the National Transportation Safety Board panel here that close supervision was ordered after the veteran ship’s master completed voluntary detoxification treatment in 1985.

Discovered by Accident

Discovery of Hazelwood’s drinking problems came by accident, however, Iarossi testified. He said officials “learned just by chance” when a company manager tried to phone the captain and found that he was in a hospital.

The disclosures came on a day when Hazelwood’s chief engineer testified that he had spent the afternoon preceding the accident eating pizza and drinking alcohol with the captain in Valdez.

Jerzy Glowacki said Hazelwood drank vodkas during stops in at least two different bars, including one where the captain expressed a preference for sailing early in order to get through ice fields during daylight. The tanker later departed after dark and was avoiding icebergs when it ran aground.

The chief engineer, who said he had a number of gin and tonic drinks, testified that he did not feel that he or the captain were impaired by their alcohol consumption.

Earlier in the hearings, however, a toxicology expert had testified that Hazelwood’s blood alcohol level could have been as high as 0.22 when the tanker ran aground, a reading more than twice the legal limit required for a driver in California to be presumed drunk, for example.

Chides Officials

At one point Iarossi seemed to be chiding officials who insisted on probing Hazelwood’s drinking habits and the company’s drug and alcohol policies.

“All the information I have still leaves me with some unanswered questions, including what impact . . . do you attribute to the alcohol issue,” he said, asserting that is still an open question.

Iarossi, the first Exxon executive to testify in the probe, also defended the company’s much-criticized spill response. He said Exxon has spent about $92 million on cleanup so far. Meanwhile Chairman Lawrence G. Rawl said at the annual shareholder meeting in New Jersey that Exxon has spent $115 million on the cleanup

But Alaska’s top environmental officer, Dennis Kelso, told the panel that neither Exxon nor Alyeska, the oil terminal operator, responded adequately to the spill.

Kelso said that while inspecting the stranded tanker with Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper, they noticed no containment booms around the tanker or along the leading edge of the oil slick. No large skimmers were visible either.

‘Not Being Delivered’

“It was quite clear to us that what was promised in the contingency plan was simply not being delivered,” said Kelso, who is commissioner of the state department of environmental conservation.

Strong criticism of the cleanup effort also came from two senior Administration officials in Washington, who told President Bush on Thursday that the response by both the federal government and the oil industry to the Exxon Valdez oil spill was slow, confused and “wholly insufficient.”

In the strongest language used by federal officials to describe the tanker accident, Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly said the planning for and response to the spill by both industry and government was “unequal to the task,” and warned that major oil spills may be unavoidable in the future.

But Iarossi insisted that “no power on Earth” could have contained and skimmed that amount of oil from the water--especially after 50-m.p.h. winds swept across the sound three days after the accident. He said spill volume was “just beyond mechanical pickup” capabilities.

And repeating a claim that is a source of controversy with state authorities, Iarossi said: “The only technology that could have worked or had a hope of working was chemical dispersants.” Exxon has accused government officials of blocking use of dispersants until it was too late to be used effectively, a claim Kelso denied.

Iarossi expressed pride in the company’s mobilization campaign that required scouring the globe for containment booms, skimmers and chemicals and getting them moving toward Valdez--what he called “the far edge of the world.”

Outside the hearing chamber, in the ballroom of the Captain Cook Hotel, state officials said that Exxon’s global search for spill equipment was actually proof that the company was not prepared for such a disaster despite promises industry could take care of any accident.

“What this shows is that they screwed up in the first place and had to go to the ends of the Earth for this stuff when it should have been readily available,” said one state official who asked not to be named.

Kelso conceded that Exxon had mounted a massive mobilization effort, but said the state had been looking to have people in the field picking up oil.

In his testimony, Iarossi also rejected suggestions that double bottom tankers could have survived a grounding like the Exxon Valdez accident without a catastrophic spill. He said that, in fact, it would likely have been even worse if the Exxon Valdez had a double bottom.

Referring to a study done with computer models that he said was completed at Exxon’s request by a San Diego shipyard, Iarossi said that in three of five cases, the tankers would have sunk, in a fourth case its survival was questionable and that in only one instance would the ship have remained afloat.

He said that because the Exxon Valdez stayed afloat the company was able to recover the remaining 42 million gallons from its ruptured tanks “without spilling a drop.”