Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

The Exxon Valdez

The Exxon Valdez, a tanker carrying oil from the Trans Alaska Pipeline, encountered icebergs in the shipping lanes after passing through the Valdez Narrows and so the Captain ordered the ship to go out of the shipping lanes to go around them (Questions, 2005). Control was then handed back to the helmsman, with orders to reenter the shipping lanes at a certain point, but for reasons still unclear, the ship failed to make the turn back into shipping lanes and ran aground on Bligh Reef at 12.04 am on March 24, 1989. Approximately 11 million gallons of oil were spilled, one of the largest ever spills in the United States and widely considered the number one spill in terms of the environmental damage it caused. The remoteness of the spill and its location along thousands of miles of rugged shoreline, coupled with the abundance of wildlife in the area, made the environmental disaster so great. Roughly 1,300 miles of shoreline were affected by the oil spill, 200 miles being heavily or moderately contaminated and the rest lightly contaminated. The spill stretched from Bligh Reef to the tiny village of Chignik, 460 miles away on the Alaska Peninsula.

Oil gets into the fur and feathers of birds and mammals, destroying their insulation value so they die of hypothermia (Questions, 2050). While trying to clean themselves up, the animals and birds ingest the oil, which is poisonous to them and kills them. The oil may also cause a slow death from liver damage or by causing blindness. Oil from the spill carried south, entering the estuaries of many pink salmon streams and gradually reached the incubation streams (ValdezScience, 2004). The oil was considerably diluted by then and levels were well below the State of Alaska criterion for petroleum aromatics in water. Marine toxicology also showed no toxic responses. The return of pink salmon throughout oiled and unoiled areas shows a lack of significant effect of the oil spill on pink sa...

Page 1 of 3 Next >

More on The Exxon Valdez...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
The Exxon Valdez. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 08:59, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708766.html