Joseph Hazelwood

He was accused of being intoxicated which contributed to the disaster, but was cleared of this charge at his 1990 trial after witnesses testified that he was sober around the time of the accident.

Hazelwood was convicted of a lesser charge, negligent discharge of oil (a misdemeanor), fined $50,000, and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service.

By his own admission, Hazelwood drank "two or three vodkas" between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. that same night, before boarding the Exxon Valdez at 8:25 p.m.[2] His blood alcohol content was found to be .061.

In March 1990 he was acquitted of second-degree criminal mischief, of operating a vessel while intoxicated and of reckless endangerment; he was however convicted of misdemeanor negligence for discharging oil, fined $50,000, and sentenced to 1,000 hours of community service.

Hazelwood never had his master's license revoked and it remained valid, but he was 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.

[12] 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, later moving to Bean's Cafe, a local soup kitchen.

The apology appears in an interview in the book The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster by Sharon Bushell.

He was the subject of a "Top Ten" list on Late Night with David Letterman, in which one of his excuses was, "I was just trying to scrape some ice off the reef for my margarita.

"[2] He was featured in the syndicated comic strip The Far Side, which showed him as a clumsy person who spilled things in various stages of his life; as a baby (his cup), teenager (pen ink in his shirt pocket), and ultimately as an adult, driving into a water tower.

[18] In the 1995 film Waterworld, Hazelwood was anointed the patron saint of the movie's villain "The Deacon", leader of the "Smokers", a band of scavenging raiders.