Accidents Are Bound To Happen
Accidents Are Bound To Happen
Jessica Guastadisegni
April 30, 2008
George Carlin, a Grammy-winning, American stand-up comedian, actor, and author so cleverly altered one of our nation’s patriotic ballads. “Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain, For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain. America, America, man sheds his waste on thee, And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea” (Guillemets 2007). Carlin is right! America is not the same as it was years ago. Man’s activities have polluted the land, the water, and the sky. There are many evidences in history that can be examined. The dumping of polychlorinated biphenyls in the Hudson River led the Environmental Protection Agency to ban consumption of its fish in 1974 (Ashley 2000). DDT, the first synthetic, organic insecticide was banned in the northern hemisphere after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Murray 2002). Pollution is not a new issue; it has been a controversial concern for years. One event that caused much debate and discussion was the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. People today are still trying to determine the effects of the disaster; yet so many don’t even know it occurred. It is hard to imagine that only nineteen years ago, oil was gushing out of a massive tanker, the media and the public were going crazy, and clean-up measures were ensuing even so leaving the Bligh Reef of Prince William Sound never to be the same again.
On March 24, 1989, four minutes past midnight, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck the Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound. Immediately, the clear waters of the area became as black as coal. Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the ship, radioed the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office back in Valdez, "We've fetched up - ah - hard aground north of Goose Island off Bligh Reef, and - ah - evidently leaking some oil" (Knickerbocker 1999). That "some oil" turned out to be about eleven million...
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