.
What happened next will later be a blur to all that were on the ship. Seconds after midnight on March 24, the ship hit the Bligh Reef. The engines were stopped right away, but the huge tanker because of its enormous size and weight, kept going for several hundred more feet. Because the tanker could not stop immediately, a huge gash was torn in the bottom of the Exxon Valdez and crude oil began spilling into the sea. Knowing what was happening, Captain Hazelwood made a bad decision and tried to use the ship's engines to force the tanker forward across the reef. This only caused the rocks to dive deeper into the hull and to release even more oil. At this, Captain Hazelwood immediately called the Coast Guard. (Blashfield, 18).
The Coast Guard then notified Alyeska of the spill. Alyeska is a large group consisting of large corporations such as Arco, British Petroleum and Exxon. These were the companies who first began to explore the possibility of drilling and transporting Alaskan crude oil to the lower United States for refining. Alyeska had 50 workers who made up the spill-readiness team for such disasters. Horribly, their ship was on land for repairs, and their equipment was stored away where the ship lay in dry dock. .
Another ship was located and the team spent the rest of the night and the whole morning moving the equipment onto the new ship. Fourteen hours passed as the team slowly loaded all of the equipment aboard the ship (Schoowe, 24). With this precious time wasted, the team arrived at the spill by 2:30 Friday afternoon. By this time a tremendous amount of oil was spilled and spread from the tanker. The team deployed a boom line in an attempt to stop the oil from spreading any further. However, there was not enough boom line to contain the spill, and oil washed over and under the line wherever it was placed. At this time Coast Guard commander Steven McCall flew over the oil spill in a helicopter and remarked: "The boom line looked like small yellow worms in a big pool of oil.
