Exxon Valdez

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Hello and welcome to Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath and I'll be the buoy,

voter under the influence for this maritime disaster.

And I'm joined by three sober sailors, Eli Noah and Tom, and also Cecil, who is fun.

Hey, hey, there's a bag.

Just because I don't drink doesn't mean I'm sober.

George is sober.

Yes, this is a great idea.

Great idea, Heath.

I'll just go ahead and let the thin veneer of control that I'm holding on to slip from my fingers.

I'm sure fun's the word we're all going to use after that.

So

cool.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Thank you, Harry.

Heath.

Cheers.

Cheers.

You are, buddy.

Cheers.

Indeed.

Cecil's fun.

So, Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Today, we're going to be talking about the Exxon Valdez.

Uh-huh.

And this is because you just got back from Alaska and you want to turn the episode into My Vacation Slides, the podcast?

I

did read the article and I'm ready to talk about it.

Heath, yes.

All right.

So, what is the Exxon Valdez?

Alaska is a vast and beauteous land filled with soaring, snow-capped mountain peaks, hardy mega fauna, and majestic fields of purple wildflowers.

Now, of course, it would be wildly oversimplifying things to act like Alaska is one singular biome.

It's too big for that.

The ecosystems there range from ice fields and alpine tundra to boreal forests and even coastal rainforests.

Guys, let's all drop our pencils at the same time.

Maybe he'll freak out and leave.

I won't.

I don't spook as easily as you do, Eli.

Now, our tendency is to.

I love that 90% of the audience.

That's right, Nick.

No idea.

I get an idea why he said that.

I did a flip with the council now our tendency is to think of the history of Alaska as beginning when Homo sapiens crossed the Bering Strait and poured into the Americas for the first time yeah I like that Noah thinks that we all have any tendency at all to think of the history of Alaska

if you were called upon to think of that.

But to understand its rugged, ominous terrains, you really have to go back to the ice ages and consider the titanic glaciers that carved out the modern landscape.

So glaciers, as we all know except maybe Eli, are formed when snow fails to melt over a long period of time, right?

So, the weight of new snow pushes out all the air bubbles in the snowpack below it, forming these gorgeous blue mountains of ice, often miles across.

I did that too.

I did.

Yeah, right.

And when those glaciers recede, either because an ice age is coming to an end or because switching to renewables would be a whole big thing, they carve out these gorgeous valleys and fjords.

And that's what gives Alaska its distinct panorama of natural beauty.

Okay, to be fair, I didn't know that.

But if you're going to point out whenever I don't know a thing you're talking about, you're going to triple the lengths of our episodes, Noah.

So

yeah, I had to hit the runtime somehow on this one.

Now, one of the most spectacular examples of this glacial landscaping is found in an area known as Prince William Sound, an inlet of water that is so still that when you go on a glacier cruise of it, the motherfuckers offer a no-seasickness guarantee or you're ready back,

which is fucking remarkable to anybody who has ever vomited their way through a whale-watching cruise in literally anywhere, right?

Or been in pre-show shenanigans with Elon.

Yeah, right, yeah.

But we're talking about one of the most pristine, diverse, and beautiful places in the world.

So, if you think about it, it's kind of the perfect place to put the terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System.

It's got to be called something else now, or the government's going to loudly remove it from service like they do anything else that's trans.

Right, and won't be able to go to the bathroom.

We can put one pipeline into the magical inlet of glacial serenity and kill the entire ecosystem one time, and these NIMBYs won't let it go for decades.

We have to build stuff.

So, the first European explorer to enter the sound was Captain James Cook, who putzed around the Gulf of Alaska for quite a while looking for the Northwest Passage for so damn long, in fact, that every major thing up there is kind of named after his expedition, or the name has been wrestled back by indigenous Alaskans until Trump decides to be more racist about it again.

Now, when Cook first discovered the already inhabited area, he named it Sandwich Sound after his patron, the Earl of Sandwich.

Later the same year, it would be renamed in honor of the 13-year-old Prince William who was serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy at that time.

Okay, well, now my bar mitzvah seems really lame by comparison.

Right?

All right, enjoy it while you can, because by the end of this administration, it's going to be renamed Cofifafe Sound, I believe.

On the map.

Now, of course, Cook's expedition just named the big shit.

That's a mountain.

Very large rocks.

Tider.

Raving churches.

So, yeah, so what I'm saying is that he didn't have time to name every little nook and cranny.

And since they were just going to replace his awesome, delicious-sounding names after snibbling brats that probably had somebody else squeeze out their fucking toothpaste for him anyway, Why bother with all the good names?

So that job fell to Spanish explorer Salvador Fidalgo, who would later name a number of features within the sound, including the Port of Valdiz, which he named in honor of Spanish naval officer Antonio Valdez-Bassan.

And I don't know anything about that dude at all, but I'm willing to bet that he had a more impressive naval career than Prince William did.

Yeah.

Probably, but now he's like the fucking Steve Chernobyl of Oil Spoons.

That's not true.

Yeah, no, you're right.

No, of course.

At the time these features were being named, there was some amount of ambiguity about whose features they were.

Among Europeans, that is, the people who had lived there for thousands and thousands of years were pretty consistent on their answers.

But from 1732 to 1867, the Russian Empire claimed colonial possession of all the northern Pacific coast territories of the Americas, then collectively known as Russian America, by Russians.

Brits knew them as far west Canada, and Americans knew them as generally available.

But conflicting colonial claims on paper were a pretty common occurrence in the 1700s.

Those questions were generally adjudicated by who was actually there.

I'm sorry, which Europeans were actually there.

And in the late 1700s and early 1800s, that was Russia.

Yeah, luckily, Russia would never rely on such a barbaric system of land ownership ever again.

Right?

Yeah, listen, Dimitri, you keep saying finders, keepers, but this is my house.

You can't finders, keepers, my house, Dimitri.

No, Russia's claims.

You can Sarah Palin's house if you want.

No, right, no, that's fine.

I can understand.

Right, obviously.

But so Russia's claims on Alaska would only last until 1867 when

reeling from a humiliating defeat in a war of aggression.

in Crimea,

where a bunch of Europeans all opposed them all at the same time and they wound up desperately short of money.

And completely unable to defend the area in case of another war, Russia sold the region to America for the absurdly low price, even by the standards of the day, of 7.2 million bucks.

What did Carlos Santayana say?

It doesn't matter.

The answer is not important.

I love whoever managed to

finagle that $0.2 million on there.

No, no,

so now that would be the equivalent, by the way, of about $129 million today.

That's for a region that covers over 665,000 square miles or 1.7 million square kilometers.

That is 17%

of the total land area of the United States.

Jesus.

America just looking between Kansas and Missouri for change that might have fallen back there.

Right.

JD, get out of here.

Get out of here.

Fucking couch fucker.

Get out of the couch, metaphor.

Scook asshole.

Today, Russia is super bitter about the sale because we very obviously ripped them the fuck off.

But it's worth noting that Russia had been trying to offload Alaska onto any goddamn buddy for years by the time America agreed to take it.

Alaska.

Get your Alaska.

It really was.

It was like that fucking, that shitty airplane that Cutter finally talked Trump into taking.

It was, and is, of course, a giant frozen wasteland that's mostly uninhabitable.

And at least at the time, there were no like major mineral deposits known anywhere in the fucking area.

In fact, in the aftermath of the purchase, it was popularly known as Seward's Folly in America after then Secretary of State William H.

Seward, who negotiated the deal.

That negative appellation, though, was swept into the historical dustbin in 1896 when prospectors struck gold.

Not in Alaska at first, mind you.

They found it in northwestern Canada, but that set off the Klondike gold rush that spilled into Alaska.

and though smaller and colder than the californian variety it still saw over a hundred thousand people trek north to the klondike goldfields to make their fortune uh only about 30 to 40 percent of them actually made it though because

fucking alaska and fucking 1800s what would you do

for a klondike and he's dead

a beautiful time full of kodiak moments uh i think you mean uh kodak moments time i very much do not.

He doesn't.

He doesn't.

Yeah, I'll skip over the Tom essay portion of this and then move straight on to 1968.

God, I wish I was dead.

But I did it.

So 1968, that's when the gold discoveries paled in comparison to what Atlantic Richfield Oil Company found there.

Guess what it was?

They struck oil in Prudhoe Bay, discovering what is today the 21st largest known oil reserve in the world.

And I think it would have been like the 14th largest back then uh it is the largest oil field in alaska but it is not the only one in alaska as it turns out you know i'm coming to believe that all of the oil in the world was somehow purposely deposited in the least desirable places of the world right like you had the barren sands of the middle east the remote wilderness of alaska

texas yeah houston yeah exactly

the traffic now so

as great as it was it was was to suddenly have these massive national oil reserves right about the time OPEC was starting to flex its political muscle, they came with a bit of a problem.

The vast majority of the oil in Alaska is found right along its northernmost edge, right in the least hospitable part of the state, which puts you high on the running for least hospitable place on earth.

That made it extremely hard to drill there.

But even once you managed to drill, it was extremely hard to get the crude that you were pumping out of the earth anywhere that you could refine it.

Enter the

mile long Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

Now, I should say the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline is a marvel of both engineering and hubris because 800 miles of metal pipe is hard to put up anywhere, right?

But most of the area they were going through had no roads, no towns, no nearby airports.

It was mountainous and craggy and frozen 11 and a half months a year or 12, depending on what part.

Keep in mind that when you build shit in Alaska, you have to cover the ground with tons of gravel first, lest the heat of your construction start melting the permafrost beneath it and making it sag.

And of course, its remoteness also makes it that much harder to maintain because if there's a problem, you can't just fucking drive out to wherever the issue is.

I mean, you can, but if you do, you live there now.

That's right.

Now you have a new issue.

Yeah, new problem.

Yeah.

So it's worth noting here that Alaska is also quite prone to earthquakes.

In fact, when they started constructing the pipeline in 1969, they were only five years removed from the second largest earthquake ever recorded.

That would be the Good Friday quake or the Great Alaskan earthquake.

That motherfucker measured a colossal 9.2 on the Richter scale.

The quake killed 139 people.

It wiped out whole fucking towns and it caused over $300 million in damage, which is pretty close to the cost of everything in Alaska in 1964.

Right.

And the epicenter of that earthquake, by the way, was pretty much exactly where the new pipeline was slated to end.

Well, the key is to put a vinegar pipeline right next to the oil one.

It shakes your gold.

Hey, what was our load-bearing croutons we got there, Jim?

But when it came time to irreparably destroy the irreplaceable ecosystem of Prince William Sound, it turns out it wouldn't take an act of God so much as just a drunk guy.

Step aside, God.

I've got this

but first we're going to take a quick break for some apropos of nothing

look at it johnson a miracle of innovation Indeed it is, sir.

Indeed it is.

3,000 barrels of oil flowing down the line.

They might not say it, but we just put the goddamn US of A back on the map.

Yeah.

Yeah, we did.

Hello, everybody.

What are we doing?

What are you guys doing?

I'm sorry, but who are you?

Oh, I'm the captain of the boat.

That boat right there.

That

oil tanker?

Yep.

Oil tanker.

Aye, aye.

Me.

Salute.

Ow!

Fuck.

Ow, sorry, Sorry.

Are you okay?

Yeah, I'm fine.

Good.

In the face.

Because I'm on my last chance.

You know what I mean?

No.

We don't.

Oh, this is.

That's nothing.

Never mind.

This is almost exactly what happened.

It is.

Okay, Susan, there's no need to be rude.

Try to save lives here.

Well, fine.

That's why you're doing it.

Hey, Tom.

What's the matter?

Oh, I got caught double dipping at the blood bank again.

You know, that's Susan.

She's a real crank.

I'm also here.

Why are you double dipping at the blood bank?

Hey, Eli, I have four kids and a Haley at my house.

I got to do anything I can to offset my wireless bill.

Well, Tom, also here, by the way, why don't you try Mint Mobile?

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I'm actually answering my eye.

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Hey, thanks, guys.

Where's Cecil?

What's been mobile?

Late, way late.

Stupid air vents!

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All right, we'll do this.

Fuck's out of the next.

So on November 26th of 1984, after marine drills in Prince William Sound, the Coast Guard's Director for Alaska Operations sent a letter to his superiors warning that the Port of Valdez was unprepared to, quote, efficiently respond to a major spill event, end quote.

Specifically noting that, quote, it appears that the Vicoma boom and/or deployment vessels used may not be adequate to handle the harsh environmental conditions of Port Valdez, end quote.

The Coast Guard proceeded to do fuck all about it.

Boom, there in abundance, let's go.

We're just doing it.

Yep.

Now, that letter would prove prophetic at 12.04 a.m.

on March 24th of 1989 when the Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker slightly longer and almost twice as wide as the fucking Titanic, ran aground on Bly Reef in the middle of that that pristine sound we were just talking about and spilled 11 billion gallons or 260,000 barrels worth of crude oil into the sea.

And for 24 hours or so, nobody could do a goddamn thing about it.

And for the 320,000 or so hours since then, nobody could do anything sufficient to contain the damage.

Well, just fly in a giant loaf of Italian bread, man.

Right.

That's what I've been saying.

Yeah, an airlift in some shaker cheese, maybe a little cracked pepper.

But do not fill up on oil spill.

You You will ruin your climate change.

You really will.

I'm so hungry now.

So, yeah, right?

Hey, TS listener, if you pay for the patron version, you can hear Heath sneak into the kitchen and make himself a snack.

I already had the stuff ready.

So we need to start the story with Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who spent the evening before the ship launched at a local bar consuming himself some alcohol.

Now, much will be made of Hazelwood's drunkenness after the spill.

And I know that the idea of a sea captain drinking at a bar is a little bit jarring, but I want to be clear from the start that the whole drunken skipper thing is an element deliberately promoted by Exxon so that they would have a scapegoat.

There is, as near as I can tell, zero evidence that this guy's drunkenness the night before or night of had anything to do with the oil spill, which happened, by the way, while he was asleep and not fucking passed out drunk or anything.

Like it happened at the time that he was scheduled to be sleeping.

That being said, he did have some drinks and then go be in charge of a giant fucking boat full of oil.

He just didn't crash it during that part of the evening.

He wakes up to the crash and the horns just honking continuously.

He's like,

first of me,

you got to blow in the tube for me.

I'm not allowed to start.

I'd say it's weird that Noah paused his essay to defend the competency of the inebriated, but then I remembered that it's two-thirds of our company.

Yeah, well, there's that.

Well, three-thirds if you leave your mango nectar out long enough.

Oh, yeah.

Never again.

So the Valdez shows up in Valdez and docks at the Marine Terminal at 11.30 p.m.

on March the 22nd.

At this point, they start pumping oil into it.

And as you know, if you've ever filled your fucking car up in the winter in a place that has winter, the colder it is, the longer that shit takes.

And when you're an oil tanker that holds over 50 million gallons, I said billion earlier when I meant millions.

It spilled 11 million gallons.

The tanker holds over 50 million gallons.

Obviously, it takes a little longer, like pretty much a full fucking day.

Which, now that I think about it, it's also about how long it takes to fill your car up on a winter morning in Illinois.

But at any rate,

they get done filling this shit up the following day at about 9:12 p.m.

and leave the terminal.

Sorry, not about.

It's exactly 9:12.

It's maritime shit.

It's always down to the minute like that.

So I can tell you that they left the terminal at 9.12 and they clear the dock at 9.21.

And crashed.

Got on the stopwatch.

Boop.

Right there.

Perfect.

Just, it feels like there's a better use for my time, but I got it.

I could have been steering this whole time.

Yeah.

So at 9.25, Captain Hazelwood heads to his cabin.

And yes, he had been drinking that night at the local bar.

He hadn't been steering the ship at any point, though.

That duty belonged to harbor pilot William Murphy and third mate Gregory Cousins.

And for the first part of this trip, the first like seven miles or so where they're pushing away from the terminal, they're also accompanied by a tugboat.

By 11.24 p.m., the harbor pilot fucks off for the night and leaves the ship to third mate Cousins.

Hazelwood does pop back into the bridge for a few minutes as the harbor pilot is knocking off for the night, but by 1147, he's gone for the night too.

Yeah, we put that smaller steering wheel in there for the captain.

It's not connected to anything.

He just comes in from the bar and he makes vroom vroom sounds until he passes out.

It's a whole thing.

That screen's just running the demo for Mario Kart.

He thinks he's playing.

You'd think you would notice on his steering wheel it says little tykes on this side, but he's exactly.

You know, we pronounce it TKs and he just assumes it's foreign.

He assumes he's Swedish.

Now, at this point, the Valdez Valdez is sailing slightly outside of the normal shipping lanes because there are icebergs floating around in the normal shipping lanes.

It was a terrible fucking place to put shipping lanes.

But apparently, avoiding icebergs is one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't propositions when you're a giant boat because it's this diversion that would ultimately run them aground.

Well, that and the fact that Cousins didn't wake up the guy who was supposed to relieve him that night.

That would have been second mate Lloyd Lacane Jr.

But Lacaine had just done a brutally long stretch of work, so Cousins felt sorry for him, and he was like, eh, what's the worst that could happen if I let him sleep another hour or so, right?

Okay, well, this, like so many of life's little problems, could have been easily avoided with a simple electrical taser shock watch alarm clock.

Tom, I know you are the one who said that joke, but I'm picturing it said by an oil-covered pelican, and it's way funnier.

You picture that.

If only there was something from history where they famously had a problem with icebergs and a woman.

What did George Santayana say about history?

I forget.

Did I call him Carlos Santayana earlier?

You did, and I was the player.

I wonder what that cool guy

played at the guitar guy with.

Oh, there you go.

George Atlantis.

You didn't get all the cats.

Yeah, I said

they're a fucking idiot.

Right, exactly.

So the worst that could happen came in the form of able seaman Robert Kagan going, hey, shouldn't that starboard light be on our port side?

followed very shortly after by what cousins described as quote a bumpy ride

Not a good

thing in your boat.

Yes, exactly right.

Yeah, so that bumpy ride consisted of six sharp jolts.

Those jolts, by the way, would be Bly Reef.

Now, the second Cousins realized they were in trouble, he did ring the captain, but the ship ran around literally while they were on the phone.

So there was probably a weird like, you know what, never mind now.

Moment.

Now you're still up there.

Throw it in reverse and then forward again.

See if you can rock it.

Rock it.

I'm going to pull kitty litter down.

Get some kitty litter down.

Get some sand.

Get some sand.

I'm going to shout out the boost.

I'll be up in like 20 minutes.

No, so okay.

So ultimately, the ship got stuck on a pinnacle of rock in almost exactly its midsection.

Eight of the ship's 11 cargo holds were breached as it lurched its way across the reef.

About 6 million gallons of crude oil spilled out into the pristine waterway within the first few hours.

Another four and a half would just ooze out of there before they could contain the spill.

And if you're thinking, hold on a a second, don't huge oil tankers have like radar or something that warns you when you're about to run aground before it's literally too late to stop?

And yes, they do and did.

Even in 1989, those ships were outfitted with a Raytheon collision avoidance system or Raycast.

But the one on the Valdez

wasn't fucking working and hadn't been working for a year.

A fact that Exxon was very much aware of.

There's just a guy whose job it was to sit on the bow and scream, Echo!

Off into the distance.

Hey, Echo guy, I don't really get your system.

You can't really do anything with that.

Hey, start yelling, Marco, and

let us know if it comes back as polo, and then we'll steer on that.

I just want to pop in here with another quick note of perspective.

The Raytheon collision avoidance system cost, as near as I can tell, brand new in 1989, about $70,000.

Oh, my God.

The prior year in 1988, Exxon earned $5.8 billion in profits.

So that means

if they had purchased a brand new collision system, Exxon's profits would have been reduced by 0.00012%.

Wow.

Yeah, it's a good thing that we don't let them be in charge of our environment anymore.

So

in the immediate aftermath of the spill, it became clear that nobody had ever given sufficient thought to what the fuck they would do if something like that happened.

The first response was to dump a chemical dispersant called 2-butoxyethanol onto the spill.

This was done by a helicopter.

It was owned by a private company, and mostly it missed.

Which is a missed.

And then, yeah, yeah.

Whoops.

Yeah, right.

So fairly large oil spill.

You would think that.

Yeah, right.

It's everywhere.

It's not left.

It's not left, guys.

Did you drop it up?

What the fuck happened?

Well, but then a bunch of people were like, hey, guys, is

dispersed dispersed what we're going for here?

And then before all the sensible people could say, well, no, obviously in Utison, somebody else was like, hey,

is 2-butoxyethanol toxic?

And yes, it is cool.

It was later identified as one of the agents that caused liver, kidney, lung, nervous system, and blood disorders in cleanup crew.

Jesus.

Hey, guys.

Hey,

what if instead of containing the problem, we kind of, you know, spread it out more, but poisonously.

Huh?

No, that sounds good.

But here's the thing.

Then we'd have two poisons, right?

You know what?

I'm going to get some poison to spread out the second one.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

I'm dropping it up.

Try spraying it up.

Yeah.

Spray it up.

So the next step was to deploy these booms and skimmers, right?

These were supposed to scoop all the oil up from the water surface, but the oil outsmarted them by going under them.

Once again, the Italians lie to us.

Plus, and this is this amazing.

The skimmers kept getting clogged with, get this, crude oil,

which is what they were designed.

Because that shit's pretty sludgy, it turns out.

But of course, skimming oil off the water didn't do shit for the oil that had already caked up on inlets and shorelines.

So they went through and just fucking power washed that shit with hot water.

Did that kill all the lichen, plankton, clams, mussels, fungi, and microbes that make up the base of the entire goddamn food chain in that area.

Why do you keep being a fucking bummer with all your bummions?

Is this when they brought in the ducks to soak it on?

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Noah, I'm still very confused.

So help me out.

There's oil

on everything, all up on the shore.

So we're going to

hose it off of the shore.

Yep.

But like, like, where?

Because there's no place called off.

I don't.

Have we tried hosing it up?

I don't know.

Okay, well, we're just spitballing here.

We're brainstorming, right?

Can we make a drain?

Does that make sense, what I just said?

Look, this is legitimately.

We're going to spray it back into the water.

It just

went back up.

But they were just like, no, no, we're going to spray it into the water where all those great booms and skimmers are clogged the fuck up.

It's like the level of incompetence is just staggering in all of this.

The Wikipedia article, by the way, describes the disaster as, quote, the costliest disaster ever with no direct human fatalities, end quote.

All those words are necessary to make that a true statement, right?

So, Exxon has spent an estimated $7 billion between cleanup efforts, legal settlements, and court-ordered fines, a number that's dwarfed by how much it would cost if they actually cleaned it the fuck up.

But it's estimated that to date, only about 10% of the oil that was spilled was actually removed from the environment at all.

The rest of it is still just floating around there, all dispersed or fucking digging its way into Alaskan beaches.

And while there were no direct human fatalities, there were plenty of direct fatalities.

It's estimated that within the first days of the spill, it killed 22 orcas, 12 river otters, 300 harbor seals, 247 bald eagles, between 100,000 and 250,000 seabirds, and most devastating of all, because they're the cutest, 2,800 sea otters.

12 river otters are like, damn, this is even my neighborhood, man.

What's up?

I'm supposed to be here today.

I feel like they only counted the bald eagles separate from the other birds because they hoped it would make America care.

Really, I'm surprised they don't have a separate number for baby ducks in there, to be honest with you.

Yeah.

It's also worth emphasizing the word direct.

when it comes to human fatalities, right?

Because no population was hit harder than herring and salmon by this.

Oil is incredibly toxic to their eggs, and whole generations of herring and salmon were lost.

That meant, of course, that whole fishing communities were lost, like whole towns.

That means people committed suicide and died from other poverty-related afflictions at a higher rate than they otherwise would have.

And you have to add to that all the diseases and shit people got from just having all this shit in their environment, especially the cleanup crews, which, of course, were largely made up of Alaska's poorest residents.

Yeah, we keep spraying at it with these hoses, but it's not disappearing.

I have cancer.

Well, have you tried spraying with a hose?

All right, well, you're not going to like this, but there's a chemo dispersant we can use.

Oh, God.

Yes, it is poison.

It is.

No, it's toxic, too.

Yeah, as it turns out.

It works as well as the other one, though.

So Exxon did their best to pin all the blame they could on Hazelwood.

He was fired and charged criminally.

Initially, he was charged with criminal mischief, reckless endangerment, and piloting a vehicle while intoxicated.

Later, though, after 20-plus people testified that he didn't appear to be intoxicated at any point in the evening or night, he was convicted of nothing but, quote, misdemeanor, negligent discharge of oil, end quote.

Oh, less charge.

Yeah, no, yeah, right.

Sounds like something that they warn you about in Leviticus or something.

Yeah.

Okay, but the idea of Exxon Valdez trying to be the guy in the hot dog suit from I Think You Should Leave is

chef's skills level for, oh man, we're gonna find who fucking did this.

A tough one.

Yes, right, yes, right.

So, and for their part, by the way, Exxon did the responsible thing and sued everybody and blamed everybody.

They sued the state of Alaska first for refusing to approve their use of dispersant chemicals for the first day of the oil spill.

A claim that was refuted by the fact that Exxon didn't need the state's permission because they already had a pre-approved cleanup protocol that included the use of those dispersants.

So, when that got thrown out, they sued the Coast Guard for having given Mariner's licenses to the incompetent crew that Exxon hired.

Right.

And when that didn't work, they sued the Coast Guard for not giving them permission that they didn't need to use those chemical dispersants.

The CEO is just in his office with the general counsel, furiously spinning the wheel of blame.

They genuinely were, though.

Yeah.

Sir, it landed on Cracker Barrel's logo again.

Just put that in your pocket for a later time.

Hey, can we sue them for not suing us out of existence?

Them can be whoever.

Can we sue them for that?

Right.

Well, now, Exxon also did get themselves sued quite a bit, but mostly they fucked their way out of that.

Like, at one point, they signed a secret settlement with like seven of the largest corporate fisheries where they agreed, the fisheries agreed to pay Exxon back any court-ordered restitution.

A fact that Exxon failed to disclose to the jury that was thus handing down a completely meaningless meaningless verdict for a thing that they'd already like secretly settled.

That feels so illegal.

It's so close to illegal.

They also, the judge said that.

The judge was like, oh, this is so close to illegal.

They also appealed every fine that they had, and they appealed it all the way to the Supreme Court, who, and I'm sure this is going to shock you, consistently sided with the giant corporation over the air we breathe and water we drink.

Right, so we ruled that they don't owe you any money, and I know no one asked us to do this, but we decided their vote is now 60 million times more important than yours that too yeah you guys should do campaign finance reform can we sue you for not doing campaign finance reform and letting us exist

also we're all wearing these collars that kill us and we're giving every american a button that turns them on but obama said we go high once at a speech so no one's gonna push their fucking button are you ah how about the good old days that this shit represents sam alito in this in this fucking case he recused himself just because he owned a bunch of Exxon stock back in the day.

What?

Wow.

Yeah,

we used to be so much more ethical.

One time a billionaire paid me to fish in Alaska, so I can't rule out this one.

I have his button.

As for this ship.

I have a ship of Exxon lawyers dressed like a duck, covered in oil, like the hot dog guy.

Now, as for the ship itself, well, despite what many people assume, it was not retired after the spill.

It was just renamed.

They called it the Exxon Mediterranean after they patched it up.

And though it was never allowed back in Prince William Sound, it did continue to carry oil for a long fucking time after that.

What's more, its sister ship, the Exxon Long Beach, never stopped running the Prince William Sound route despite being the exact same design.

Now, eventually, the Mediterranean Navell D's was sold to a Chinese outfit and renamed Dongfang Ocean, where it would go on to get up to its old ways and run into shit again.

Specifically, a multi-flagged cargo ship in the South China Sea.

Two years after that, it would be sold for scrap for an estimated 16 million bucks.

All right.

If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, besides campaign finance reform, what would it be?

We probably are going to get a good deal on Siberia once they lose that war in Ukraine.

And are you ready for the quiz?

Oh, hell yeah.

All right, Noah.

Since you got to base your essay on your vacation, what should listeners look forward to from the rest of the cast?

A, an Icelandic story from Cecil's anniversary trip.

B, something about a Scottish castle from Heath's honeymoon.

Or C, Tom will stop writing essays for this podcast.

Well, okay, so secret answer, almost exactly A, but not quite.

All right, Noah,

what was the captain actually drinking that night?

A, a Moscow fuel.

B,

black goldschlager.

C,

gasoline.

D,

rum a ground.

Or E,

anything on the rocks.

All right.

Well, Cecil, I believe that is our first reference to cough syrup with.

purple hard candy.

Hard candy.

I believe that's the first time.

That's something you drink

on our show.

So I feel like it's got to be answer C, gasoline.

Ah, you are correct.

Nice.

All right, Noah.

Long Island, Texas tea, stupid.

God.

Noah, how did the corporate bigwigs wash their hands of this problem?

A, it just never dawned on them to pay.

B, they greased everyone's palm olive.

C,

not writing checks was their real joy.

Or D,

there's still a picture of a goddamn duck on my bottle of dishwashing liquid because these fucking assholes will take even the most tragic shit and sell it back to our stupid asses as if it were wholesome and heartwarming.

And then we buy it with a grin on our idiotic faces because we're a nation of stupid assholes who deserve it every time the orcas sink our yachts.

Secret answer E, you remember how after 9-11 they sold the FDNY hats everywhere?

Yeah,

Sure did.

Never forget, Noah.

Absolutely.

I do remember that.

Amazing.

Never forget.

All right.

You got him all right.

You have won, Noah.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Well, I want a Cecil essay next.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Cecil, Noah, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and Cecil will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive dissonance, the No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dads, God-Awful movies, scathing atheists, skepticrat, and DD minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citationpod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

Can you turn it?

Nope.

We've run up pretty hard.

Damn.

Hey, guys, I heard like a real big bump.

Like real big.

Everyone okay?

I brought fireball, by the way.

We've run aground, sir.

We're losing oil fast.

Oh, man.

Man.

Did you hear me when I said I brought fireball?

Yep.

We heard.

Oh.

Okay.

So did you want?

No.

Got it.

More from me?

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