Radar Lost Exxon Valdez, Operator Says

The Coast Guard radar operator who was on duty when the Exxon Valdez ran aground testified Monday that he never looked for the tanker on his radar screen before it ran aground and created the nation’s biggest oil spill.

Bruce Blandford, testifying in the trial of former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood on felony criminal mischief and other charges, said he came on duty 40 minutes before the disaster. He said he was told by Gordon Taylor, the operator who preceded him, that the ship had gone out of radar range.

Blandford said he heard nothing from Hazelwood and added, “I wasn’t looking for him because he had been lost (from radar), and I had no reason to believe anything was happening other than what Mr. Taylor had told me.”

He said he went about straightening up papers, had coffee and did his chores without looking at the radar before he got a radio message.

He said Hazelwood called to report the Exxon Valdez was “hard aground and leaking oil.”

“Did you respond immediately?” asked Assistant Dist. Atty. Brent Cole.

“It seemed like forever,” said the witness. “It took about a minute for me to figure out what was going on.”

Blandford said he glanced at his radar screen and could see the marker indicating the troubled ship.

“I asked him (Hazelwood), ‘Are you about a mile north of Bligh Reef?’ And he said yes,” Blandford said.

In other testimony, two seamen who took turns at the helm on the Exxon Valdez painted a chaotic picture of the minutes before the tanker went aground.

Harry Claar told of being at the helm about 11:20 p.m. when Hazelwood ordered him to put the ship on automatic pilot. He said he followed the order and yielded the helm to Robert Kagan just before midnight.

Kagan said he knew the tanker was on automatic pilot when he took over and can’t remember when the order came to go back to manual steering. He said he and the third mate, Gregory Cousins, were near the autopilot control and, “We both reached for it at the same time.”

Then, he said, he heard three separate commands to go right, left and then right again. In the final seconds before grounding, he said, there was a command to turn hard left, and Cousins grabbed the wheel with him.

“I started making the turn, and he grabbed the wheel and helped make it,” Kagan said. “I think he was kind of panicking then. He was kind of excited.”

At last, Kagan said, he heard “a little rattle, bumping” and the ship was aground.

Asked about Hazelwood’s orders after the grounding, Kagan said he can’t be sure whether the captain was trying to move the ship off the rocks or stabilize it on the rocks.

“I really wasn’t sure what he was doing,” the witness said.

Cousins took the stand briefly before court recessed and was to tell his version of the grounding today.