On March 24th 1989 (20 years ago) Exxon Valdez, an American oil tanker, was involved in the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history where over 2000 kilometers  coastal line was filled with over 40,000 tonnes of crude oil. This happened outside Alaska and the approximate damage to the animal life in Alaska was: 250,000 seabirds, nearly 3000 sea exit, 300 seals, 250 sea eagles and around 20 killer whales have been killed as a direct result of the spill.  In addition, reduced stocks of small fish as herring and cod.

A whole Indian community that lived on fishing in the area went bankrupt just because of the accident!

Exxon dismissed the drunk captain and was sentenced in 1994 to pay five billion U.S. dollars in damages. Exxon did however manage to get the U.S. judicial system to reduce the fine down to just 500 million U.S. dollars.

Still 20 years later there are still some oil on the coastal line, but Exxon is not interested in cleaning up any more since they claim the oil residues are not dangerous to the wild life.

Exxon Valdez was repaired, renamed to the Sea River Mediterranean, and continued to go in traffic for Exxon until 2002 but with the prohibition to sail to Alaska and European ports. According to some sources the ship remains in the Far East…..

Support WWF in their work making the world a better place since companies like Exxon seems to not be interested in helping.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Alaska, Exxon, Oil, WWF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.