Exxon Valdez
A grounding that rewrote the rules of oil shipping
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Prince William Sound is a fjord system in Alaska rich in fish and seabirds, with the shipping terminal for Arctic oil at its head. The spill produced the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which among other things required double hulls on tankers — a rule that has gradually gone global. The cleanup also yielded an uncomfortable finding: high-pressure hot-water washing killed more shoreline life than the oil had, and beaches left alone recovered faster. Oil still lies beneath the stones on several of those beaches, more than thirty years on.
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An oil tanker ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, releasing over forty million litres of crude oil. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds died, and the area's fisheries never fully recovered.
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