Shortly after midnight on March 24, 1989, an oil tanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company slammed into a reef off the coast of Alaska. By the time the resulting spill was stemmed, enough crude oil to fill 125 Olympic-size swimming pools had gushed into the Prince William Sound, killing 250,000 seabirds. Two decades later, a drilling rig operated by British Petroleum (BP) exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, releasing at least 15 times more oil as the Exxon spill. More than a million birds died in the disaster, deemed the largest accidental oil spill in history.

For the 1989 spill, Exxon paid the United States government $100 million in criminal fines for injuries to fish,