SEATTLE _ Before dawn on March 24, 1989, Dan Lawn stepped off of a small boat and onto the boarding ladder dangling from the side of the grounded Exxon Valdez oil tanker. As he made the crossover, he peered down into the water of Prince William Sound, and saw, in the glare of the lights, an ugly spectacle he would never forget.
"There was a 3-foot wave of oil boiling out from under the ship, recalls Lawn, who was then a Valdez-based Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation employee helping to watchdog the oil industry. "You couldn't do anything to stop it."
Lawn was one of the first responders to reach the 986-footlong Exxon Valdez after it went off course and punctured its hull on Bligh Reef in a debacle that marked its 30th anniversary Sunday.
Lawn spent a long day on board assessing the damage as oil gushed out. There would be no quick and coordinated spill response to slow the spread. Some 11 million gallons of crude would leak out of the Exxon Valdez in what was then the largest oil spill in U.S. history, and one that Lawn had long warned could happen.
Eventually, the oil would foul parts of 1,300 miles of coastline, killing marine life ranging from microscopic planktons to orcas in an accident that would change how the maritime oil transportation industry does business in Alaska, and to a lesser extent, elsewhere in the world.
Today, due to changes to U.S. law and international regulations, all oil tankers traversing the oceans are double-hulled, unlike the more breech-prone single hull of the Exxon Valdez. This significantly reduces but does not eliminate the risk of spills, as was demonstrated last year when a double-hulled Iranian tanker exploded and leaked fuel oil after crashing into a freighter in the South China Sea.
In Washington state, the Legislature overhauled oil-spill laws in the years after the Exxon Valdez. The state is a regional refining hub, with more than 9.45 billion gallons of petroleum products traveling over water annually. The lawmakers' actions enabled the state Department of Ecology to strengthen prevention and response efforts. All barges carrying oil _ as well as oil tankers _ must have double bottoms. Another requirement is for a rescue tug to be stationed at Neah Bay to respond to vessels in distress.
The volume of oil that tankers carry through Washington waters could increase dramatically in the years ahead. That's because Canada is poised to approve a tripling of capacity in the TransMountain Pipeline so that bitumen processed from interior oil sands can be exported from British Columbia to global markets.
The threat of massive spills does not only come from tankers. The 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion that killed 11 workers led to an oil spill of 168 million gallons _ dwarfing the amount released by the Exxon Valdez.
"If there is a single lesson we have learned, it's that we have to do everything possible to prevent all sorts of scenarios that could lead to a catastrophic spill," said Rick Steiner, a marine conservationist who _ at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill _ was employed by the University of Alaska in the Prince William Sound community of Cordova.
