joseph hazelwood became the only person criminally charged for the exxon valdez oil spill. we have a manmade destruction that probably has not been equaled since hiroshima. his close friend from college joined his defense team. he was neither drunk nor reckless in his behavior. hazelwood was facing up to 12 years in prison for one felony and three misdemeanors. the jury would have to decide was he impaired at the time of the accident and was he reckless to leave two lower ranking shipmates to steer the tanker when he left the bridge? joseph hazelwood goes to trial this week. not a single witness testified that captain joe hazelwood showed signs of being impaired by alcohol that night.
barge for use in an oil spill is outfitted and ready in the summer, he says. but all equipment is stored in winter. some of the equipment was in the storage room. most of it was outside in a field covered in snow. in a statement to cnn, aleyska said the exxon valdez oil spill was an unprecedented and tragic event. the resources in place at the time were nowhere near as comprehensive as the world class prevention and response system in place today. improvements that were long overdue. everything in those memos came true. do i wish it hadn t? absolutely. lawn s agency, among others, would conclude alyeska s response was slow and weak. it did not meet the requirements of the contingency plan. they should have had their
fossil fuels out of the ground than ever before, and environmentalists like yourself are going to point at these occasional mishaps. but, you know, we need this stuff. we ve got to burn it. and accidents happen. so do we get too panicked about spills? no, we don t get too panicked about spills. in fact, we don t get panicked enough. amazing it s 25 years since the exxon valdez spill. you know what technologies they re using to clean up an oil spill, now in galveston pay or four years ago with bp in the gulf of mexico, the same technologies they used 25 years ago. this is an industry pouring billions of dollars into figuring out more and more intricate ways to get stuff out of the ground. what we ve seen is they re not putting the investment to prevent or clean up. the innovation on the extraction side is amazing. everything that s coming out of the ground now because of unconventional oil, horizontal drilling, all this stuff 10, 15
of the environmental disaster. he was vilified as a drunk. reporters revealed he had a history of drinking. he abused alcohol. he admits that to me. there is so much more on this story on what went wrong and it starts with his interview. exxon valdez. reporter: march 24th, 1989, captain joseph hazelwood s emergency call to the coast guard. what s it like to hear that 25 years later? still pretty difficult. reporter: captain hazelwood has maintained a stoic silence
when you look back at all this, bp, exxon valdez, the question you have to ask yourself is, where exactly is the accountability here? i ll tell you. last week, mere days after reach a deal with the environmental protection agency to once again begin offshore drilling, bp paid $42 million to the u.s. department of interior of .03% of last year s profits for the rights on 24 potential new drilling sites. not just talking about oil, though, here. the business of fossil fuel extraction across the board tends to be a very dirty business. last week, north carolina s duke energy got busted for dumping 61 million gallons of coal ash waste into a canal leading to the cape fear live, marking the eighth time in less than a month that the nation s largest electricity company has been cited for environmental violations. state regulators asked a judge to throw out a settlement on a $99,000 fine that would not have forced duke energy to clean up its own pollution.