The Valdez Oil Spill Captain Slips Away

Though he had been drinking, Captain Joseph Hazelwood insisted this had nothing to do with the incident.

Joseph Hazelwood, the infamous captain of the Exxon Valdez, passed away last week at the age of seventy-five in his hometown of Huntington, Long Island, New York.

Hazelwood admitted some responsibility for his part in one of the worst environmental disasters in history but remained indignant about doing so.

His spin on the topic, which remained consistent over the years, was basically this:

‘While I did nothing wrong, the responsibility of the ship ultimately falls on the captain, and so I am responsible by default,’ which amounts to a no-contest plea and isn’t really consistent with the idea of the noble captain accepting ultimate responsibility.

While this was irksome, he had a bit of a point. The narrative that Hazelwood was drunk behind the wheel while slamming the tanker into a reef is false, a veritable Mandela Effect. He was actually drunk and asleep below deck.

What was absolutely maddening was Hazelwood’s subsequent lack of consequences and his strategizing to avoid them.

Here are the bare facts:

• At the time of the Exxon Valdez Petrolocaust in March of 1989, Hazelwood’s New York issued driver’s license was suspended. He had been cited for a DUI six months earlier.

• In fact, his driver's license had been suspended or revoked three times by the state of New York for alcohol related violations in the past five years.

• In 1985, while captaining ships for the Exxon company, he received permission to take a three month leave and enter an alcohol rehabilitation program at South Oaks Hospital on Long Island.

• During court proceedings following the wreck he would state that he suffered from "depression, characterized by episodic abuse of alcohol.”

In what world is it possible that this didn’t exclude him from captaining commercial ships? While he could not legally drive a car, he could command a 987-foot-long tanker loaded with fifty-million gallons of crude oil.

• Hazelwood testified that he drank “two or three vodkas” between the hours of 4:30 and 6:30 p.m. the night of the wreck before boarding the ship at 8:25 p.m. He went to bed at 9:25 p.m. The ship began moving at 11:24 p.m.

• The Third Mate, Gregory Cousins, had been navigating the massive tanker out of the harbor—one of the more complicated parts of any nautical journey—alone. This is highly unusual and against protocol.

• At 12:04 a.m. the vessel slammed into the ocean floor. Hazelwood was below deck, drunk, asleep.

• He was awakened and ascended to the cockpit and tried to dislodge the impaled ship by means of full throttling, reversing, and repeating. This was against protocol and made the situation much worse by further ripping the hull of the boat.

Following what Exxon’s PR department called a “spill,” meaning, whoops, eleven million gallons of poison seeping into the ocean, it was revealed that Exxon knew the ship’s radar system was in need of repair but did not want to pay to fix it, and that it had repeatedly ignored a host of other safety violations.

Hazelwood escaped the charge of operating a vessel while intoxicated because his blood samples reading .061—which is a little drunk—were deemed inadmissible because they were not properly administered. They were taken ten hours after the crash.

This could mean a few differing scenarios: Hazelwood was extremely drunk ten hours earlier and had residual alcohol in his blood, or he sobered up after the crash and had a few drinks between the crash and the blood test, or the reading was totally unreliable because a de-fermenting agent wasn’t added to the samples and there was no way of telling his actual level of intoxication and the tests needed to be disregarded. A jury settled on the latter theory.

He was convicted of illegally discharging oil, a Class B misdemeanor, the same charge you’d get for dumping a few quarts off the side of your Grady White, and sentenced to one thousand hours of community service and a fifty thousand dollar fine. The Coast Guard suspended his captain’s license. For nine months. Nine months.

You might think Hazelwood would be grateful for getting off lightly and humbly serve his community service, but what happened next was patently devious and didn’t smack of someone harboring the slightest hint of remorse.

Chalos & Brown, the law firm which represented Hazelwood at trial, and like its client, based on Long Island, apparently took a liking to him to the point that they hired him as a consultant and paralegal.

From this position, Hazelwood was able to work on his own behalf and file appeals on his case to avoid paying his fine and serving his community service. He successfully stalled for ten years, eventually exhausting all appeals, at which point he begrudgingly paid his dues.

He also scored a favor from his alma matter, the State University of New York Maritime College, which hired him with full salary as a teacher aboard one of their training ships.

Lesson One: Don’t get so drunk that you can’t even count the number of vodkas you had before boarding the boat you are captaining.

In 1999 he did an interview with The New York Times in which he stated,

“As far as I was concerned — and as every jury that’s ever heard the facts in this case has found — alcohol had nothing to do with this grounding.”

What we’re left with is a study in nepotism which deserves a much deeper dive, all the way down to the still tarry rocks of Prince William Sound, and perhaps a glaring case of white privilege to be pointed to over the false ones.

The verdict: Joseph Hazelwood was a weak, terrible man who happened to be an alcoholic, and who had no business being a captain, and, just like his employer, Exxon, didn’t pay for his crimes, and didn’t care about them.