Exxon Valdez ghost lives on

Alaska Dispatch

The SeaRiver Long Beach, the sister ship of the Exxon Valdez, is a single-hull tanker still used to transport Alasak crude.

Alaskan fisherman J.R. Janneck's boat is 38 feet. The SeaRiver Long Beach, the sister ship of the Exxon Valdez, which caused the worst oil spill in U.S. history, is 987 feet and carries 1.5 million barrels of oil. There is another difference.

"My boat is double-hulled... and it was built in 1985," Janneck, 63, said as he worked on his silver salmon fishing boat in Valdez Harbor last month. Twenty years after the March 24, 1989, disaster, Janneck still remembers the "tiger-stripe sheen" of oil in the water and the absence of birds around him.

Even after 79 percent of the world supertanker fleet has been replaced by craft with two hulls, Exxon Mobil Corp. remains the biggest Western user of the older designs. It hired more of the tankers last year than the rest of the 10 biggest companies by market value combined, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Read the rest of this report at Bloomberg News.

The SeaRiver Baytown, shown here in Valdez late last month, is a single-hull tanker with a double bottom.