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...next major battleground will be the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Oil companies suspect that this 19 million-acre preserve, lying between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea on the North Slope, just east of Prudhoe Bay, may contain some 9 billion bbl. of oil, and they are eager to drill there. President Bush and the U.S. Interior Department favor opening up the area to exploration and development. Unlike Bristol Bay, where powerful fishing interests have always fought drilling, the land adjacent to this preserve is home only to a handful of Inupiat. Alaskan politicians thus have had little...
...shipping lanes and into harm's way. Cousins and finally Hazelwood, who had returned to the bridge, issued contradictory orders. Shortly after midnight, the tanker impaled itself on Bligh Reef, its hull torn by gashes, some thought to be 15 ft. wide. At least 240,000 bbl. of oil, equal to 10.1 million gal., poured out of the wounds...
...West Coast, oil companies had been shrugging off environmentalists' forebodings of just such an occurrence. In January 1987, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the consortium of oil companies (including Exxon) that manages the pipeline, filed a contingency plan with the Federal Government detailing how it would handle a 200,000-bbl. spill in Prince ; William Sound. Alyeska did so only grudgingly, however, protesting, "It is highly unlikely that a spill of this magnitude would occur. Catastrophic events of this nature are further reduced because the majority of tankers calling on Port Valdez are of American registry and all of these...
...word, says an Alyeska supervisor, "complacency." Lulled by almost twelve years of oil shipping through Valdez without a major accident, Alyeska let its old equipment run down to the point that it was taxed to the limit when it cleaned up a small spill of a mere 1,500 bbl. in January. Workers who had been hired to devote full time to combatting oil spills were replaced by people whose primary duties lay elsewhere. The state government failed to keep Alyeska up to the mark; the legislature denied its watchdog agency funds for inspecting oil terminals and was pretty much...
...rate of 20,000 gal. an hour, emergency teams found ducks coated with crude and sea lions with flippers drenched in oil clinging to a buoy near the wreck. By the time the leak had slowed to a dribble a day later, an estimated 270,000 bbl. of oil had escaped, producing a slick 8 miles long and 4 miles wide. It appeared to be the largest spill, if not the worst in terms of ecological damage, in U.S. history...