Post-Exxon Valdez
Captain Hazelwood never had his masters' license revoked and it remains valid to this date, but he has been unable to find long-term work as a captain after the spill. His alma mater, SUNY Maritime College, hired him in a show of solidarity as a teacher aboard the T/S Empire State V the year after the incident with the Valdez. In 1997, he was working as a para-legal and maritime consultant with New York City's Chalos & Brown, the firm that represented him in his legal cases. He was residing on Long Island in Huntington, New York in 1997.
Though he was originally sentenced to assist with the clean-up of the oil spill, due to the lengthy appeals process, his community service was conducted in the Anchorage, Alaska, area, beginning in June 1999 picking up trash from local roads then later moving to Bean's Cafe, a local soup kitchen. His community service was conducted over five years with the Anchorage Parks Beautification Program. He paid the $50,000 fine in May 2002.
In 2009, Hazelwood offered a "heartfelt apology" to the people of Alaska, but suggested he had been wrongly blamed for the disaster: "The true story is out there for anybody who wants to look at the facts, but that's not the sexy story and that's not the easy story," he said. Investigative reporter Greg Palast supports Hazelwood's contention and assigns significant blame to Exxon, writing, "Forget the drunken skipper fable." At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate." Yet Hazelwood said he felt Alaskans always gave him a fair shake. The apology appears in an interview in the book The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster by Sharon Bushell.
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