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Exxon Valdez
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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