Tanker Inquiry Reflects Blame Beyond Captain

From the moment the harsh perfume of hydrocarbon vapors first rose like an evil mist over Bligh Reef, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood has been one of America’s most infamous villains, the “drunken mariner” who fouled Prince William Sound, the “tanker captain from hell.”

In the weeks ahead, Hazelwood will have to answer state charges that the grounding of the Exxon Valdez on March 24 was caused by his reckless conduct, based on allegations that he was intoxicated and left an unqualified officer in charge of navigation.

But investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board may not find it simple to assess blame for the worst oil spill in U.S. history, not only because of conflicting evidence about Hazelwood’s role, but because it seems clear, after a week of public hearings, that there is so much blame to go around.

Assessing the Blame

For example, there could be blame for:

--The third mate and the helmsman who steered the ship out of the designated traffic lanes to avoid icebergs, then failed to execute the routine course change previously ordered by the captain that would have prevented the accident.

--The Coast Guard radar operators who, because of faulty equipment or inattention, failed to alert the ship that it was heading into the rocks.

--The Exxon Shipping Co., which allegedly monitored the alcohol dependency problems of its captains poorly, and which, with its demands for more work out of fewer crew members, sent a tired crew back to sea the night of March 23.

--The terminal operator, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., responsible for reacting quickly to any oil spill, whose docked and broken salvage barge became a symbol of impotence and broken promises from the first hours of the disaster.

--And fate, which turned little things like inopportune shift changes and an earlier-than-expected departure time into possible catalysts for disaster.

“Capt. Hazelwood has been blamed for everything from the grounding to the dead birds to the poor cleanup, but . . . he’s not the captain from hell. He’s just the world’s biggest scapegoat,” said Michael G. Chalos, the captain’s attorney.

Even an official of the state of Alaska, which is pursuing criminal prosecution of Hazelwood, said that to fully investigate the accident “we’ve got to look beyond the workings of one man.”

Clearly, however, all assessments of the causes of the tanker grounding and disastrous spill begin with the disputed role of the ship’s master. The following account is based on nearly 50 hours of testimony last week and more than 1,000 pages of investigative documents released so far by the safety board.

In 1987, Hazelwood took command of one of the newest ships in the Exxon fleet--the 987-foot Exxon Valdez, a ship capable of carrying more than 200,000 tons of oil and one of the biggest in the Alaska oil trade.

Two years before getting this prized assignment, Hazelwood had admitted himself to a hospital suffering from depression and alcohol dependency. A doctor’s report said he had been “drinking excessively, episodically” and was having family and job problems as a result. (At the time of the grounding, he had no automobile driver’s license because of a drunk driving conviction.)

In fact, the veteran tanker master’s company performance evaluations ranked Hazelwood in the bottom third of the fleet captains. He was credited with “gifted intelligence” and technical excellence and good seamanship. But he was criticized for inadequate business and management skills.

Both his doctors and fleet supervisors recommended a shore assignment. Instead, he was given the Exxon Valdez.

To assure Hazelwood’s recovery from alcohol abuse, Exxon sent supervisors to “observe him and discuss his problems,” according to Frank Iarossi, president of Exxon Shipping. However, those observations were made at prearranged meetings during port calls in San Francisco or Long Beach.

Safety board investigators questioned how reliable such a monitoring system could have been. One state official put it bluntly: “Hazelwood wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t going to meet his fleet supervisors with a beer in his hand when he knew they were coming.”

He wasn’t being supervised in Valdez.

The captain went ashore at about 11 a.m. Thursday, March 23--first stopping by the ship’s agency to take care of business matters, then going to lunch at the Pizza Palace with his radio officer, the chief engineer and port pilot Ed Murphy. Hazelwood told investigators he had one beer with lunch.

When they left the ship, the posted departure time was 9 p.m., but when they reached the agent’s office it had been changed to 10 p.m. There was concern at the terminal that the loading would take longer.

After lunch Hazelwood went shopping and ordered Easter flowers for his wife. Meanwhile, back at the ship, departure time was moved up to 9 p.m. again. But Hazelwood did not know it.

The three officers met again at a local tavern called the Pipeline Club. Hazelwood told investigators he was there only a few minutes and had one beer. His colleagues said they were there for more than two hours and that Hazelwood drank vodkas.

Hazelwood told Chief Engineer Jerzy Glowacki that he would rather sail in daylight the next day because of reports there were icebergs in the shipping lane, hazards that are normally found in June, not March. However, another tanker was due in that night and needed the berth the Exxon Valdez was occupying.

The officers made one more stop: the Club Valdez, where they had another round of drinks while waiting for the chief engineer to pick up an order of pizzas to take back to the ship.

Surprised by Departure

It was 8 p.m. when they got back to the terminal. Alyeska guards did not notice any drunkenness among them. But the Exxon officers were surprised to find their ship already being prepared for departure. Tugs were alongside and pilot Murphy was on board.

Hazelwood rushed to the bridge still in his overcoat. Murphy noticed the smell of alcohol on the captain’s breath, but detected no physical or mental impairment.

Once clear of the Valdez Narrows, the pilot left the ship and Hazelwood ordered a course change. It was about 11:30 p.m. He radioed the Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Center that he was going to turn south, slow down and “wind my way through the ice.”

Hazelwood had a lot of paper work to do, a lot of the administrative chores normally completed before departure. He told Third Mate Gregory T. Cousins he needed to go to his cabin.

But first, Hazelwood took Cousins over to the navigation chart. The captain wanted Cousins to stay on the course he had set until he cleared the ice and then to come right at a point just off Busby Island.

Hazelwood stuck his finger on the precise spot where the turn should be made and asked Cousins if he was comfortable with that.

“Yes, I am,” Cousins assured him. The captain went below.

Routinely, the midnight shift takes its place on the bridge at 11:50. Cousins was due to be replaced then by Second Mate Lloyd LeCain, who had gotten little more than an hour’s sleep since his last watch. Cousins decided to let his replacement get a little extra sleep. He did not place the wake-up call.

Cousins himself had slept only about four of the last 24 hours since the Exxon Valdez arrived in port. Docking, loading and departure are demanding times for the three bridge officers.

Although serving as third mate on this voyage, Cousins, 39, was a licensed second mate. He did not have a pilot’s license for Prince William Sound, however, and he had only limited experience on the bridge during navigation of this area of the sound.

New Helmsman

Robert Kagan, the relief helmsman, arrived on the bridge, but he was cold and returned for a warm jacket. It was about 11:55 when he took the wheel. The tanker was off Busby Island, at about the place Hazelwood had indicated the ship should begin turning away from the rocks.

But by now the third mate had discovered that the icebergs extended much farther down the traffic lanes than Hazelwood had expected. Nonetheless, Cousins prepared to change course, studying his radar before fixing the ship’s position with a circled “+” on the chart.

About that time Cousins realized the helm was set on automatic pilot. He immediately reached for the console button to disengage. Kagan had apparently intended to do that himself but said: “He beat me to it.”

Kagan was not perceived to be the best helmsman on the Exxon Valdez. In fact, LeCain told investigators he was “not confident” of Kagan’s ability to steer and he had gone to sleep intending to replace him at the helm with Maureen Jones.

Jones was the lookout. Instead of taking a position on the ship’s bow, where her predecessor was posted, she went to the bridge wing deck at Hazelwood’s instruction. It was not clear why, if the crew was concerned about avoiding icebergs, it did not keep the radio-equipped lookout on the bow.

She was barely in place on the bridge, however, when she saw the flashing red warning light on Bligh Reef, a light indicating that the ship was off course in the “red sector.” She reported to Cousins.

The mate calmly ordered a turn, right 10 degrees. When nothing happened he ordered “right 20 degrees rudder.”

Here the record is murky. Cousins says he ordered the course change seven minutes before the crash. The ship’s mechanical course recorder indicates that no course change occurred until two minutes before the crash--creating what one investigator labeled “the five-minute gap.”

No Answers Emerge

Perhaps the ship was still in automatic pilot, although Cousins emphatically denied that. Perhaps Kagan failed to follow the mate’s orders. Perhaps Cousins was slow getting his position fixed and simply waited too long to change course. No answer emerged from testimony, but there were opinions.

“If he had turned where the captain told him to turn, none of us would be here today,” Hazelwood’s attorney said.

Coast Guard officials would not speculate, but their investigators repeatedly probed witnesses about the autopilot and suggested in their questioning that the course recorder indicated the ship was handled so smoothly that it was likely under mechanical, not human control.

Cousins could not explain it. He said he ordered a course change and the ship failed to respond. “I honestly cannot pinpoint the reason,” he testified.

There might have been one more chance to avoid the grounding. As the tanker strayed far outside the designated traffic lanes, far beyond the course change approved by the Coast Guard, no traffic control officer called to warn the ship or to ask what it was doing.

At the Vessel Traffic Center, no one was watching the radar.

Gordon P. Taylor, a civilian radar technician at the Coast Guard traffic center in Valdez, was muttering about his equipment. It was acting up again.

A few minutes earlier he had approved the course change of the Exxon Valdez but, as he told investigators, he was having trouble keeping the massive radar target on his screen. He said the image kept “bleeding off.” One sweep of the radar beam and the ship would be there, but on the next it wouldn’t.

He tried different ranges that cover areas farther out into the sound. It didn’t work, he said. He finally set the radar on a six-mile range. But the Exxon Valdez already was beyond that distance.

It wasn’t clear whether Taylor considered taking further steps to locate the tanker, but he didn’t. At the traffic center, just as on the Exxon Valdez bridge, it was time for the shift change.

The bespectacled Bruce Blandford relieved Taylor, was told that the tanker was maneuvering to avoid ice and that the radar wasn’t performing well. Blandford checked to see if he could find the Exxon Valdez. He said it didn’t show up on his screen.

It was about to show up on the screens of television sets around the world.

There had been no tanker accidents in Valdez since the pipeline terminal opened in August, 1977, and suggestions that complacency may have replaced vigilance--at the Coast Guard traffic center, at the oil terminal and aboard the ships--came from many sides during the last five days.

The Coast Guard, for instance, ordered its traffic controllers to stop plotting the courses of tankers in order to avoid excess paper work. If controllers had been plotting the Exxon Valdez, they would have been in contact by radio, if not radar, to keep an accurate fix on its position.

Alyeska, which had a plan for a theoretical spill of 200,000 barrels, but regarded even that as a statistical improbability, did not have in place even a fraction of the material needed to meet the onslaught of a real 260,000-barrel spill.

In fact, the centerpiece of Alyeska’s initial cleanup response fleet, a crane-equipped barge, had been unloaded and moved away from the terminal because it had a hole in its side and needed repairs.

“Nothing worked the way it was promised,” a state official said.

And Dennis Kelso, Alaska’s top environmental official, said the result is that Alaska “lost its innocent trust” in the industry that had said this couldn’t happen.

What continues to trouble attorney Chalos, however, is that the blame for the worst oil spill in U.S. history is falling on his client: Capt. Hazelwood.

“It’s convenient to say that this was all the result of one man’s actions, because they can say it can’t happen again. But it will. Tankers have accidents. This was an accident,” he said.

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