Exxon Valdez

The ship once known as the Exxon Valdez has been sold for scrap 23 years after causing the worst tanker spill in U.S. history, which led to new designs for oil carriers. Now called the Oriental Nicety, the vessel was sold for about $16 million to Global Marketing Systems Inc. in Maryland, the world's biggest cash buyer of ships for demolition. Converted into an ore carrier in 2007, it changed owners and names four times after the 1989 accident, American Bureau of Shipping records show.

One of the nation's busiest seaports partially reopened to ship traffic on Tuesday after it had been closed because of a weekend oil spill in the waters near Houston, Coast Guard announced. Traffic resumed flowing through the Houston Ship Channel about 1 p.m. local time, Coast Guard Petty Officer Manda Emery told the Los Angeles Times. There was no estimate when the channel will be fully reopened or how long it will take to clear the backlog of more than 100 vessels waiting to get through.

Work crews refloated the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez almost two hours ahead of schedule today, and the ship that caused North America's worst oil spill was hauled toward an oil-fouled island 25 miles away for temporary repairs. The Coast Guard said the 987-foot tanker was pulled off a reef and refloated at 10:35 a.m., two hours before high tide. Six tugboats took part in the operation.

Some lessons take a long time to sink in. The Exxon Valdez disaster, which occurred 25 years ago this week when the oil tanker struck a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, was both the product of previous lessons unlearned and the source of new lessons that continue to be overlooked. One lesson was that industry self-regulation and lax governmental oversight don't work to the public's benefit. In this case, the vessel was operating on March 24, 1989, with an overworked crew that was half the size of standard crews 20 years earlier; the tanker's hull construction didn't meet specifications agreed to by the oil industry for tankers carrying Alaskan oil. The Coast Guard, which was charged with conducting safety inspections  of tankers, didn't do so because its staff had been cut by one-third.  The environmental effects of the spilled oil in what was then the largest ever in U.S. waters--it was surpassed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico--have been worse and longer lasting than anyone anticipated.

ALANG, India - For the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez, even sailing quietly into the sunset is proving difficult. Now called the Oriental Nicety, it's floating off India in a kind of high-seas limbo as a court decides whether the vessel that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's unspoiled Prince William Sound in 1989 can be hacked apart in this forlorn graveyard for once-mighty ships. Local environmentalists have petitioned the High Court here in the western state of Gujarat to block its entry pending an onboard inspection for toxic chemicals, including mercury, arsenic and asbestos.

A federal appeals court Friday cut in half a $5-billion jury award for punitive damages against Exxon Mobil Corp. in the 1989 Valdez oil spill. The case, one of the nation's longest-running noncriminal legal disputes, stems from a 1994 decision by an Anchorage jury to award the damages to 34,000 fishermen and other Alaskans. Their property and livelihoods were harmed when the oil tanker Valdez struck a charted reef, spilling 11 million gallons of oil. It was the third time the U.S.

Some lessons take a long time to sink in. The Exxon Valdez disaster, which occurred 25 years ago this week when the oil tanker struck a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, was both the product of previous lessons unlearned and the source of new lessons that continue to be overlooked. One lesson was that industry self-regulation and lax governmental oversight don't work to the public's benefit. In this case, the vessel was operating on March 24, 1989, with an overworked crew that was half the size of standard crews 20 years earlier; the tanker's hull construction didn't meet specifications agreed to by the oil industry for tankers carrying Alaskan oil. The Coast Guard, which was charged with conducting safety inspections  of tankers, didn't do so because its staff had been cut by one-third.  The environmental effects of the spilled oil in what was then the largest ever in U.S. waters--it was surpassed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico--have been worse and longer lasting than anyone anticipated.

Alaska's Court of Appeals on Friday reversed the conviction of Exxon Valdez captain Joseph Hazelwood in the nation's largest oil spill, in which 11 million gallons of crude flowed into Prince William Sound in 1989. A jury had convicted Hazelwood of negligent discharge of oil, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined $1,000 for his role in the March 24, 1989, oil spill.

After weeks of idling in waters off the coast, the battered and reviled Exxon Valdez began its slow journey into San Diego Harbor, where it will undergo extensive repairs to its hull--and possibly a name change. The tanker ran aground on March 24 in Alaska's Prince William Sound, causing the biggest oil spill in U.S. history. The tanker was inspected off San Clemente Island by California officials, who gave the go-ahead for the tow operation to begin after no oily discharges were spotted.

After the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in 1989, experts predicted it would take years to clean up the worst oil spill in U.S. history and restore the pristine waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound. It has turned out that cleaning up the massive litigation in its wake has taken even longer. To the surprise and dismay of some weary plaintiffs' lawyers, the Supreme Court announced Monday that it would reconsider whether Exxon Mobil Corp. can be forced to pay a record $2.

A portion of the lower Mississippi River reopened Monday after a weekend oil spill, but another stretch remained closed, leaving 29 ships stuck, according to U.S. Coast Guard officials. Officials had closed a 65-mile stretch of the river and the port of New Orleans after 31,500 gallons of light crude oil spilled from a barge that ran into a towboat Saturday about 50 miles west of New Orleans. On Monday, officials reopened a portion of the river east of the spill to vessels with Coast Guard approval.

A federal safety alert Thursday warned that crude oil flowing out of new fields in North Dakota may be more flammable than expected, a caution that comes several days after a train carrying about 3.5 million gallons of the same oil crashed in the state and set off a massive explosion. The accident on the BNSF Railway, the fourth such explosion in North America involving crude oil trains, has fed mounting concerns over public safety as the rail industry sharply increases the use of rail to transport surging crude production in North Dakota, Texas and Colorado.

ALANG, India - For the ship formerly known as the Exxon Valdez, even sailing quietly into the sunset is proving difficult. Now called the Oriental Nicety, it's floating off India in a kind of high-seas limbo as a court decides whether the vessel that dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's unspoiled Prince William Sound in 1989 can be hacked apart in this forlorn graveyard for once-mighty ships. Local environmentalists have petitioned the High Court here in the western state of Gujarat to block its entry pending an onboard inspection for toxic chemicals, including mercury, arsenic and asbestos.

The ship once known as the Exxon Valdez has been sold for scrap 23 years after causing the worst tanker spill in U.S. history, which led to new designs for oil carriers. Now called the Oriental Nicety, the vessel was sold for about $16 million to Global Marketing Systems Inc. in Maryland, the world's biggest cash buyer of ships for demolition. Converted into an ore carrier in 2007, it changed owners and names four times after the 1989 accident, American Bureau of Shipping records show.

President Obama has nominated an Alaska Supreme Court justice who earlier served on Planned Parenthood's board and battled Big Oil over the Exxon Valdez spill to a seat on the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The White House announced late Wednesday that it was proposing Justice Morgan Christen for one of three open seats on the San Francisco-based appeals court. The proposed elevation of the 49-year-old Washington state native was made on the eve of a contentious vote called in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Obama's first nomination to the 9th Circuit, that of UC Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu, which has languished in the Senate for 15 months.

Richard N. Goldman, a San Francisco philanthropist and civic leader who co-founded the Goldman Environmental Prize to recognize grass-roots environmental activism around the world, has died. He was 90. Goldman, a passionate supporter of environmental causes, the Jewish community and Israel, died Monday at his San Francisco home, according to his family. The Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, created in 1951 by Goldman and his wife, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, has given away more than $680 million since its inception.

The Exxon Valdez, the tanker that caused the nation's worst oil spill, will be renamed Exxon Mediterranean and will sail in the Mediterranean or Middle East when it is returned to service in August. Exxon Shipping Co. President Gus Elmer said today that the decision to rename the vessel was consistent with its relocation to the foreign service. "Due to declining Alaskan crude oil, the vessel will enter foreign service, most likely loading crude in the Mediterranean or the Middle East.

After spending around half a billion dollars, scientists paid by the government to study the Exxon Valdez oil spill over the last two decades still cannot answer some of the most important questions about the damage it caused or about whether Prince William Sound will fully recover. We're in danger of ending up just as ignorant after the BP oil blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, as once again, our legal, political and economic systems hobble scientists and pervert the search for answers.