Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
A few minutes after midnight on Good Friday, 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound. Fully loaded with Prudhoe crude, the tanks began leaking oil into the pristine waters.
I arrived the day after the spill. I had begged my editor at Nataional Geographic to send me there. After three phone calls when he said no, he called me back and told me to go up there for three days.
What he didn’t know was that I had already reserved a small plane to shoot aerials the next day, and reserved a hotel room and car in Valdez. I knew it was going to have a huge impact, especially in the spring when shore birds would be nesting, seals, sea lions and otters pupping and herring spawning in the kelp lining the bays. It was going to be an ecological disaster.
For almost two months I hitch-hiked across the Sound on fishing boats, ferries, mail planes and Coast Guard cutters.
