you are almost done first click run below

#You are almost done first click run below series

On the very night that the tanker departed, in fact, marine biologist Riki Ott spoke at a public meeting of concerned Valdez residents to warn officials of the potential consequences. Long before a tanker named the Exxon Valdez left the port late on March 23, 1989, locals knew “the Big One” was coming. The Coast Guard dropped its double-hull mandate in the face of industry opposition, and contingency plans were drawn up based on unrealistic assumptions.Īs the risks mounted, and minor incidents and near-misses added up, environmental advocates issued increasingly urgent warnings about the tanker traffic in Prince William Sound. The region’s navigation system was downgraded to save money. Pilotage requirements were eased at oil companies’ request. Gradually, however, many of the promised safety measures went unfulfilled, ebbed away or fell victim to cost-cutting. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which shipped oil to the port of Valdez in Prince William Sound, was selected over other options that included a 580-mile railroad extension from Fairbanks. Department of the Interior A 1972 federal government study evaluated options for transporting crude oil from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. For nearly 12 years, it was.Ĭourtesy of the U.S. In short, facing widespread environmental concerns, the backers of the project promised that everything would be fine. Tankers would be double-hulled to lower the risks of spills, and robust contingency plans would spell out effective containment measures in the event that disaster did strike. An upgraded navigation system would further reduce the chances of a ship veering off course. Experienced harbor pilots would guide vessels through the length of Prince William Sound.

#You are almost done first click run below series

It was a solution that came with its own set of risks, and in the years leading up to the pipeline’s completion, the federal government and the consortium of oil companies that built it made a series of assurances about the safeguards that would be in place. The route would have hauled as much as 2 million barrels per day from the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, but in the end it was ditched in favor of what was deemed a safer and more efficient method of transport: the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which instead pumped the oil 800 miles to the port of Valdez, where it could be loaded into tanker ships. Department of Transportation in the early 1970s.

That label belongs to a proposed 580-mile, dual-track railroad to the northern coast of Alaska studied by the U.S. At 88 miles long, with a projected capacity of up to 350,000 barrels per day, eastern Utah’s Uinta Basin Railway would rank among the most ambitious efforts to haul crude oil by rail ever undertaken in the United States.īut it’s not the largest ever considered.