CAPTAIN GETS DRUG, ALCOHOL TEST IN VALDEZ
TWO CREWMEN ALSO TESTED; MECHANICAL FAILURE RULED OUT

By DAVID HULEN
Daily News reporter

VALDEZ- The Coast Guard has given drug and alcohol tests to the captain and two members of the crew of the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez, and a team from the National Transportation Safety Board is scheduled to arrive here today to find out why the accident that caused the nation's largest oil spill happened.

The head of Exxon Shipping Co., which owns the tanker, said his company's investigation is now focused on the actions of the captain, a watch officer and a helmsman the crewmen responsible for guiding the vessel as it steamed away from the oil port here toward the Gulf of Alaska.

The three men were identified by an Exxon spokesman as Capt. Joe Hazelwood, 44, of Huntington, N.Y., Third Mate Gregory Cousins of Tampa, Fla., and helmsman Robert Kagan of Harohan, La.

Mechanical problems or failures have been ruled out as a cause of the shipwreck, Frank Iarossi, president of Exxon Shipping Co., said.

Iarossi said the ship was making a series of course changes to avoid ice when it ran aground on Bligh Reef, about 25 miles southwest of here, early Friday morning. The captain, he said, was not on the bridge at the time, but instead had gone to his cabin a deck below.

The accident punched holes in eight of the vessel's tanks, sending more than 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil into the waters of Prince William Sound.

Hazelwood was described as "exhausted" by Iarossi, who said he had taken off the grounded tanker Saturday afternoon and is now in Valdez. He said Exxon has provided Hazelwood with an attorney.

The Coast Guard issued subpoenaes on Saturday to the captain, the mate and the helmsman, listing them as principals in the NTSB investigation and requiring them to be available for questioning, a Coast Guard spokesman said.

The three men were ordered by a pair of Coast Guard investigators to give blood samples aboard the ship on Friday morning, according to Todd Nelson, a Coast Guard spokesman. The samples were sent to Anchorage, where they were to be analyzed for both alcohol and drugs.

Coast Guard officials would not say whether results of the tests are known. Under federal law, such tests are required of all crewmen "directly involved" in serious marine accidents.

Iarossi said two Exxon lawyers boarded the grounded tanker, about 25 miles south of Valdez near Bligh Island, on Saturday and began interviewing crew members.

According to the Coast Guard and Exxon officials, the ship left the Alyeska tanker terminal near Valdez on Thursday night and steamed on a routine 10 miles. After it passed through the threequartermile wide Valdez Narrows, it dropped off the harbor pilot and continued south toward the Gulf of Alaska.

The ship "ran across ice after dropping off the pilot," Iarossi said, "and in the process the vessel made a series of course changes and had turned toward the . . . ship lane when it grounded."

The ship is sitting between one and two miles east of the regular tanker shipping lanes, its bow pointed west toward the shipping lanes.

Exxon officials can still not explain why the ship veered so far outside the lanes, or why crew members failed to avoid the reef, which local boaters describe as one of the bestknown hazards in Prince William Sound.

The Coast Guard routinely monitors tankers coming and going from the Alyeska port, using radar to track the vessels. But the Valdez was on the outer edge of the area that can be monitored by radar, and a spokesman said the ship was not being monitored because there were no other ships in the area and there was no danger of a ship to ship collision.

The NTSB's involvement in the investigation is not unusual, according to a safety board official in Washington, D.C.

"The safety board is charged with investigation of all aviation, highway, railroad, marine and pipeline accidents," said Terry J. Armentrout, director of the agency's Bureau of Accident Investigations.

"Since this is a U.S. flag ship, we have investigative authority," he said, adding that the board looked into about 30 marine accident last year. "We are not the Coast Guard that makes and enforces the rules."

The team is being headed by Bill Woody, a marine safety investigator. The team is composed of three marine investigators and a "human performance investigator," whom Armentrout described as a person trained in psychology to look into such things as fatigue and substance abuse.

Daily News reporter David Whitney in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.

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