Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 26, 1990 TAG: 9003262170
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Did justice miscarry on Thursday because an Alaskan jury acquitted Hazelwood of three more serious charges, one a felony? Improbable. He was not malicious, only careless.
Whether he should keep his captain's license is questionable. But he should not be scapegoated for an accident when the greater negligence is elsewhere. Most of it lies at the door of Exxon, other oil companies and shippers that have resisted more stringent regulations to prevent spills. Blame also rests with equivocal governments, lax regulators and a society that prefers not to think about what can happen until it does.
Big spills make big news, and several others in the past 12 months have grabbed national attention. But on average, more than 20 oil spills of varying magnitude occur every day in U.S. waters or on its soil. The Wilderness Society, which has documented 100 of the most damaging such accidents since last March, says experts estimate that since the Exxon Valdez incident there have been about 10,000 spills that "pollut[ed] America's land and water with 15 to 20 million gallons of oil."
America runs on petroleum. It supplies most of our energy. We burn more of the fuel than any other country in the world; nearly half what we use is imported. All that messy stuff has to be moved around and stored: in ships, trucks, pipelines, tanks. The potential for accidents from equipment failures, human error and the like is enormous.
So is the potential for environmental damage when those accidents occur. Depending on the size and location of a spill, animals and plants may die; water supplies may be polluted and local ecology disrupted; local economies may suffer severe setbacks. The damage also can be lasting, and cleanup is not always thorough.
Oil companies have frequently been lax in guarding against spills; that has been the case in the Alaskan waters since the pipeline was opened more than a decade ago. (That overland line now is corroding and weakening; to prevent leaks and other failures, it needs maintenance on a scale not anticipated when it was installed.) To give the companies greater incentives for vigilance, their legal liability for shipping spills should be increased; such legislation (HR 1465) appears on the way to enactment by Congress.
At issue in that same measure is a requirement that all barges and tankers plying U.S. waters have double hulls within 15 years; that too ought to pass. As Virginia has just done, states should strengthen their own laws, regulations and liability standards for the handling and shipping of oil.
Shippers and oil companies complain, of course, that such provisions will raise the price of petroleum products. In itself, there's nothing wrong with that. The prices of many kinds of commerce do not reflect the costs they exact from society.
That certainly is true of oil. Higher prices would do more than anything else to wean the nation from its dependence on petroleum and encourage development of alternatives, especially cleaner fuels. In so doing, we will protect not only our environment but also our economy, which remains vulnerable to a renascent oil cartel. Captain Joseph Hazelwood didn't intend it, but his tanker's catastrophic accident helped alert others - again - to many overlooked perils.
by CNB