Originally published in Outside's June 1989 issue

Good Friday, March 24, 1989
A quarter of a century ago to the day, big chunks of south-central Alaska shuddered and crumbled in an earthquake that demolished the port town of Valdez and lowered its shoreline by six feet. There was talk that day of sacrifice and resurrection. But what happens today will test that kind of faith. In a flat calm sea, the supertanker Exxon Valdez misses a deepwater dogleg in the shipping lanes and wanders into shallow water with 50 million gallons of oil in her hold and an allegedly drunk skipper in command. Or not in command, it seems: Captain Joseph Hazelwood has steered his 987-foot ship onto an incorrect course and gone below.

At 12:04 a.m., the ship lurches. She has snagged on a rock pinnacle about 50 feet below the surface. In the wheelhouse, the crew tries frantically to correct the course, but can't. Impaled, the ship fishtails around the rock fulcrum, shudders, and grinds to a halt as her stem rides up onto a submerged shelf on Bligh Reef

Bligh Reef: In 1910, the steamship Olympia ran aground in foul weather here, and here it perched for a decade—a landmark, a warning, and a popular deck for tea parties on nice afternoons. Otherwise, the reef has never been much of a problem. A few fishing boats have smacked it lightly or snagged a net on it while chasing salmon or herring, but their skippers knew where it was, knew the risk.

The reef juts like a bad underbite off the northwestern shore of Bligh Island in Alaska's Prince William Sound. It was once a place of clear water, of seabirds and sea mammals. Otters lolled around it, dived down into it for crabs and shellfish. Sea lions careened among its barnacles chasing herring or salmon, and sometimes a pod of the sound's 215 killer whales went in after the sea lions.

Captain Joseph Hazelwood won't lose his ship to the reef; neither did Captain William Bligh, for whom it is named. Bligh, the same man who 12 years later was set adrift by Fletcher Christian and the crew of the Bounty, was the first white man to anchor off the island, when he served as a navigator under Captain James Cook in 1778. Both Bligh and Cook sailed on to their own tragedies, one to mutiny, one to a knife in the back. Their stories were examined a few years later by the poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, who perused the sea captains' journals and brainstormed the composition of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner during a hiking trip through the English countryside. At the core of all tragedy, they decided, is the one mistake that places a man beyond redemption.

Hazelwood has made his mistake, and now comes the tragedy: More than ten million gallons of thick North Slope crude are transfusing the arteries of Prince William Sound. When a grim Officer Michael Fox of the Alaska Division of Fish and Wildlife Protection comes aboard to ask what happened, Hazelwood's face is slack.

"I think you're looking at it," he says.