The Exxon Valdez - The disaster that hasn't ended

Our newest podcast tells a shocking story. 

On a late March evening in 1989, Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by the Exxon Shipping Company, spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. At the time, it was the largest single oil spill in U.S. waters. The spill covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals, and whales.

The world thought that was the end of the story. But there’s so much more to what happened that night in Alaska. A co-production with Cited Podcast, the documentary investigates the Exxon Valdez spill 35 years later, bringing new voices, new information and new stories to one of history’s most infamous environmental disasters.

Episode one, Slick Science, takes listeners back to the late March evening that changed everything for a small Alaskan city.

The city of Valdez, Alaska is nestled in a deep fjord surrounded by mountains. Tourists come to the area to see the glaciers, fish in the cold mountain-fed water, and visit the ice caves. The city is also a hub for oil tankers that power up the long fjord to the marine terminal to fill cargo tanks bigger than cathedrals with oil from the Trans-Alaska pipeline.

Host Gordon Katic speaks to scientists and fishers who form unlikely friendships and paints a meticulous picture of how an oil spill impacts the environment, economy and people.

In the first episode we meet Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist and activist who was one of the first few to see the spill.

“We come over the mountain range, and there's this tanker, and it's got a blood-red deck, and it's sitting in the midst of this black ink stain of oil,” she said.

“And then I realized we were all getting dizzy and headaches and it was the fumes coming off. I mean, it's like a gas station with no controls. The air was turning bluish over this spill.

Linden O’Toole, the co-chair of the Cordova Oil Spill Response Office, was also early to the scene.

“We had a place where people could come in and debrief after being out there,” O’Toole said.

“I remember one man, he came in and described watching… a sea otter scratched its eyes out because of the oil in its eyes. And people were just devastated at the carnage, you know, and the animals, the thousands and thousands of dead animals, and the oiling of our beautiful, pristine home.”

Award-winning producer and journalist Gordon Katic hosts the show and immerses listeners into one of the darkest days in marine history. With a background in health, science, and climate reporting, Katic humanizes science through his storytelling.

Find episode one, Alaskan Nightmare, wherever you get your podcasts.