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Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

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Exxon Valdez Oil Spill of 1989
Isaac Mitchell
Maine Maritime Academy

The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 occurred in Prince William Sound off the coast of southwestern Alaska. The date when the oil tanker ran aground was March 24th, 1989. It struck Bligh Reef at about 12:04 a.m. There have been various estimates of how much oil spilled into the ocean. A total of 11 million US gallons was a commonly accepted estimate of the spill’s volume, used by the State of Alaska’s Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and environmental groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club ("Questions and answers," 1990). Other groups, such as Defenders of Wildlife, question the official estimates, maintaining that the volume of the spill went underreported (DeVries, Luts, 2004). Alternative calculations, based on an assumption that the seawater rather than oil drained from the damaged tanks, estimate the total to have been 25 to 32 million US gallons (Bluemink, 2010). Because of the spill many practices were going to change in the shipping industry. The Exxon Valdez oil spill drastically changed the United States’ shipping regulations, policies, and documentation.
The Exxon Valdez damaged eight of its eleven tanks on board, spilling 11 million gallons of its 53 million gallon cargo of oil. Those 11 million gallons would spread and ultimately impact over 1,100 miles of non-continuous coastline in Alaska, making the Exxon Valdez oil spill the largest oil spill in U.S. history until the Deepwater Horizon spill last year surpassed that. A significant regulation that came about as a result of the Exxon Valdez oil spill is that Congress (in a result to the Oil Pollution Act of 1990) is requiring every U.S. oil tanker to be double-hulled by the year 2015.
After the spill, the worst part of the disaster was the unpreparedness of the

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