History for the day: 1989: Exxon Valdez

History.com has this for 24 March:

One of the worst oil spills in American history begins when the supertanker Exxon Valdez, owned and operated by the Exxon Corporation, ran aground on a reef in Prince William Sound in southern Alaska. An estimated eleven million gallons of oil eventually spilled into the water. Attempts to contain the massive spill were unsuccessful, and wind and currents spread the oil more than a hundred miles from its source, eventually polluting more than seven hundred miles of coastline. Hundreds of thousands of birds and animals were adversely affected by the environmental disaster.
It was later revealed that Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Valdez, was drinking at the time of the accident, and allowed an uncertified officer to steer the massive vessel. In March of 1990, Hazelwood was convicted of misdemeanor negligence, fined fifty thousand dollars, and ordered to perform a thousand hours of community service. In July of 1992, an Alaska court overturned Hazelwood’s conviction, citing a Federal statute that grants freedom from prosecution to those who report an oil spill.
Exxon itself was condemned by the National Transportation Safety Board and, in early 1991 agreed under pressure from environmental groups to pay a penalty of a hundred million dollars and provide a billion dollars over a ten-year period for the cost of the cleanup. However, later in the year, both Alaska and Exxon rejected the agreement, and in October of 1991, the oil giant settled the matter by paying twenty-five million dollars, less than four percent of the cleanup aid promised by Exxon earlier that year.

Rico says we should've required Hazelwood to clean some of the beaches, preferably by licking the oil off the rocks... (And how did Hazelwood report the spill, if he was drunk?)