"You get inside my notebook when I'm talking to you. Once you're inside my notebook there really isn't a way out, other than to tell the entire story."
--Seattle Post-Intelligencer investigative reporter Eric Nalder

Following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, authorities responded with a new set of safety regulations for big oil vessels. Reforms ranged from requiring tankers to be built with double-hulls (to reduce the likelihood of spills) to limiting work hours for crews in order to help curb human error. The oil transportation industry entered an era in which there would be far less likelihood of oil tanker accidents -- or so it seemed. However, in the fall of 2004, a spill of hundreds of gallons of thick crude oil in Seattle's Puget Sound led a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to embark on an investigation into the state of the Pacific Northwest's oil transport industry. Aided by an initially reluctant whistleblower's wealth of firsthand evidence, journalist Eric Nalder made some very unsettling discoveries - and revealed how oil tankers are not as safe as they might seem.

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Read Eric Nalder's story "The Human Factor: Why Another Exxon Valdez Could Happen," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (March 2005) which first appeared in the March 22, 2005 edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The four-part report focused on an unreported oil spill in Washington's Puget Sound. The result of an intense two-month investigation, Nalder's story included diagrams of the anatomy of an oil tanker, charts comparing the worst oil spills in history, and evidence that Houston-based ConocoPhillips and its subsidiary, Polar Tankers, participated in an oil spill cover-up.