Hazelwood Tells of Images That Still Haunt Him

Former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood is haunted by images.

Images of devastation: fouled beaches, dead birds, dying otters. “Hazelwood’s otters,” some called them.

“It was a terrible tragedy . . . It will affect me, like it will affect everyone else, for a long time.”

Images of faceless, nameless accusers, of being constantly pursued, like the tragic figure from “Les Miserables.”

“It seemed like I was Jean Valjean with about a hundred inspectors chasing me around the sewers of Paris.”

Images on television screens: a balding, bearded man with frightened eyes. His own image.

“It’s like an out-of-body experience. I say: ‘Gee, that guy’s got a lot of trouble. I feel sorry for him.’ ”

For the reclusive Hazelwood, who until a year ago regarded himself as an anonymous “Joe Schmoe, the boat driver,” those statements broke a year of silence about his reaction to the nation’s worst oil spill.

Ironically, Hazelwood’s words came shortly before an Alaska judge sentenced him on his misdemeanor pollution conviction and scolded him for failing to apologize about the spill.

What Judge Karl Johnstone could not know was that in a hotel room across the street from the courthouse Hazelwood was, for the first time, revealing some of his feelings about damage caused by the accident.

“Sure, it bothered me. It was terrible,” Hazelwood told reporters. “. . . It’s like any devastation. It’s terrible whether it’s Chernobyl or medical waste washing up on my back yard in Long Island.”

However, his attorneys prevented him from answering any questions reflecting on the degree of personal responsibility he feels for the accident.

Hazelwood and his attorneys agreed to a 90-minute interview Friday with four reporters representing the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, the Anchorage Times and Newsday. The conditions were that the interview would not be published before Sunday and that the former captain would not be questioned about specific events or actions related to the grounding.

The attorneys said such discussions could interfere with an appeal of his misdemeanor conviction and with 150 pending civil damage claims naming Hazelwood and his former employer, Exxon Corp.

Hazelwood was acquitted of three serious criminal charges that carried maximum penalties of seven years in jail--a criminal mischief felony, operating a vessel while intoxicated and reckless endangerment.

He was convicted only of negligent discharge of oil, a misdemeanor, and many of the jurors attended his sentencing hearing to support the former captain.

But Johnstone not only criticized his failure to apologize but seemed to ignore the jury’s innocent verdicts.

“No reasonably prudent person operating a tanker like the Exxon Valdez would have had those drinks before getting on board or would’ve left the bridge when Capt. Hazelwood did,” the judge said. “In my opinion . . . that constitutes, at the least, negligence.”

A few hours earlier Hazelwood had reflected on his experiences in the legal system--and on his rude departure from a life of solitude and anonymity.

The front page of Friday morning’s edition of Newsday--the Hazelwood family’s hometown paper in Huntington, N.Y.--carried the bold headline: “Victory for Hazelwood.”

Heading for his meeting with reporters, he passed the page to his wife, Suzanne, without smiling.

“Last time I was on the front page of Newsday the headline was ‘Drunk at Sea,’ ” Hazelwood said.

That’s what his neighbors read. And his parents. And the friends of his teen-age daughter.

“We were leading a reasonably normal life, just loping along, and our whole world just did a 180-degree turn,” he said.

Media types camped on his doorstep, rifled his mail, carted away his garbage and put camera lenses up to his windows. He was forced to move out of his own home for several days.

He was just beginning to realize how much his life had changed on the rocks of Bligh Reef.

Hazelwood entered the judicial system in a Suffolk County court where he surrendered a year ago to face the Alaska criminal charges for which he was substantially exonerated last week.

The media interest was great--apparently the heat of too many television camera lights was what kept setting off the court’s fire alarms.

Finally, however, Hazelwood was arraigned and bail was set at a whopping $1 million. The judge called the oil spill an “environmental Hiroshima.”

“I went in there reasonably starry-eyed that justice would be served . . . that the facts would bear fruit and things would be fine,” Hazelwood recalled.

But after the $1-million bail in New York (reduced on appeal a day later to $25,000), and a seven-week trial in Alaska, Hazelwood calls the justice system “a meat grinder.”

“It’s like a sausage machine where you go in in one form and you come out the other end as something else,” he said. What Hazelwood says he’s come out as is a cynic.

For a shy man accustomed to the solitary life of a seaman, Hazelwood clearly has been embarrassed by his notoriety.

“I’m Joe Schmoe, you know, just a boat driver, basically . . . thrust into the limelight, catapulted into the starring role,” Hazelwood said.

“I wasn’t equipped for it. Most people aren’t. Maybe a Zsa Zsa wants this, the flash of the bulbs and the videotapes rolling in her eyes. I never did.”

Most trouble, apparently, was the very public dissection of Hazelwood’s previously private battles with alcohol dependency. Twice he had been arrested for drunk driving. In 1985 he spent 28 days in a treatment program for alcoholics.

In his trial, Hazelwood--through his attorneys--had acknowledged drinking prior to sailing, but the amount he consumed was disputed. Not one of 21 witnesses--most of them called by the prosecution--testified to any signs that the captain had been impaired by drinking that night.

The jury not only acquitted him, but individual jurors strongly criticized the state for bringing the charges in the first place.

“Alcohol was the biggest red herring in this whole deal,” Hazelwood told his interviewers. “It made splashy headlines, but it had nothing to do with this” accident.

It had a lot to do with Hazelwood’s hard feelings about the way he was treated by the public--particularly by the press and public agencies.

“I resented . . . the dragging in of my private life into a public arena. Anyone would resent that,” he said.

There were moments of doubt. Nagging, chilling, frustrating moments wondering how a jury without sailing experience would understand the world of merchant seamen.

“With a jury, you just never know,” Hazelwood said.

Hazelwood had gone to sea as a boy of 14, working as a commercial fisherman off the East Coast.

“It always appealed to me. I wanted to see what was over the horizon,” he said.

He recalled one voyage as chief mate on a freighter when the captain called him to the bridge as the ship eased out of New York harbor.

“He said: ‘Can you find South Africa?’ and I said: ‘Yessir.’ He says: ‘Call me when you raise Table Mountain’ ” in South Africa.

Hazelwood, who was accused of being criminally reckless for leaving the bridge of his tanker in Prince William Sound, said his freighter master never returned to the bridge unless he was summoned by his officers.

He said for a captain to be off the bridge is common on modern ships. It was because Hazelwood was off the bridge, however, that the jury convicted him of the lone charge of negligence.

Hazelwood approached the jury’s moment of decision with fatalism.

“I was apprehensive, but I realized that . . . I wasn’t going to be taken out and shot. They wouldn’t treat me like (executed Romanian dictator Nicolae) Ceaucescu,” he said.

But, with his wife and father in the back row, Hazelwood waited in the deafening silence of a hushed courtroom for the jury to file in.

“My heart . . . it was close to palpitating,” he recalled.

He heard nothing after the judge read the first “Not” in the litany of not guilty verdicts. He didn’t hear the burst of applause.

“I was in like a vacuum,” he said.

Now Hazelwood wants another kind of silence. The silence of the sea.

But first he faces Coast Guard license hearings in Long Beach, possibly next month.

For the first time since the Exxon Valdez rumbled up onto Bligh Reef, however, Hazelwood is at least glancing into his future

“A year from now . . . (I want to be) at sea someplace--going somewhere or coming from someplace.”