The Exxon Valdez is remembered in infamy. But what about Alaska’s previous largest oil spill?

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story.

Nothing — no training or safety equipment — truly prepares a person to be suddenly tossed upside down inside a ship on a stormy Christmas morning. On Dec. 25, 1979, the 30-man crew aboard the M/V Lee Wang Zin were thrown about as the freighter suddenly capsized. Anything unsecured, from the smallest personal items to heavy machinery to the people themselves, was instantly transformed into haphazard missiles. After a brief flight, the crewmembers crumpled against bulkheads, fixtures, and debris, luckier still than any standing near the searing boilers. Worst still, there was the influx of frigid water as most merchant vessels are not strictly secured for sea. Caught without the necessary gear, the crew had minutes to live.

For many obvious reasons, people tend to remember the first times, the champions, and the groundbreakers. The second instance of events, runners-up, and followers are more often buried within the currents of history, retrievable but rarely memorialized. Bill Egan was the first governor of the state of Alaska. Without looking it up, who did he defeat in that 1958 election? Answer at the bottom. In this way, every good Alaskan knows something about the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, at the least that the environmental disaster happened. Less well known is the Lee Wang Zin, the source of the previous largest oil spill in Alaska history.

The M/V Lee Wang Zin was a Panamanian-registered, Taiwanese-owned, Japanese-chartered 741-foot ore freighter. She left Prince Rupert that 1979 Christmas morning, a Tuesday, bound for Japan with nearly 60,000 tons of iron ore pellets. The ship immediately encountered winds of 45 to 60 miles per hour and waves running 15 to 25 feet high. Shortly after 9 a.m., the ship capsized within the Dixon Entrance.

There is no clear explanation for why the ship capsized. Some contemporary observers theorized that part of the hull had catastrophically failed. The freighter had also endured severe weather while crossing from Japan to Prince Rupert. She might have also struck a reef that punctured a ballast tank. A Transport Canada inquiry favored this latter explanation.

The popular theory then was that the ship became unbalanced from a ballast issue or shifting cargo. Though the ship was not visibly listing at Prince Rupert, the Canadian Coast Guard inspector there did not check the holds, instead accepting the assurances of the crew that the cargo was stored correctly. Another dock worker noticed water in one of the cargo holds, which could have made the small iron pellets more liable to shift. A ship officer told him the water would be pumped out before loading any more pellets, but this was also not verified.

The Canadian Bull Harbour Coast Guard Station at the northern end of Vancouver Island received the first garbled SOS at 9:25 a.m. The SOS and ship call sign repeated three times, then nothing else. Neither the ship’s name nor location was broadcast. Unsure of the freighter’s location, helicopters were dispatched from Juneau and Victoria to begin the search. They were still searching three hours later, far longer than any unprepared crew member could have survived in the icy water.

In the frantic mess of it all, no one with the Coast Guard contacted the pilot service at Prince Rupert. Bob Fisher, who had piloted the Lee Wang Zin out of the harbor, was the last person to see the crew alive. He could have informed the rescue effort of the ship’s course and speed. “They didn’t phone me,” said Fisher. “I finally phoned them. They didn’t do a thing. They wound up with a salvage operation.” A subsequent Canadian coroner’s jury criticized the Coast Guard’s slow response, blaming them in part for the deaths of the crew. Notably, it had taken the Vancouver Island station an hour to even identify the Lee Wang Zin as the ship in distress.

Four hours after the first SOS call, a Canadian Coast Guard helicopter finally located the freighter, its freshly painted red hull bobbing in the sharp waves. Though a tug boat tried to keep the ship in open water, it drifted onto rocks by Kendrick Bay on Prince of Wales Island, about 50 miles south of Ketchikan. The ongoing storm prevented direct rescue efforts for several days.

The first body was found on the following day, Wednesday, in a nearby Prince of Wales Island inlet. He was only wearing a life jacket, windbreaker, and slacks, a sign of how quickly everything had fallen apart on the Lee Wang Zin. A U.S. Coast Guard cutter found the second body on Thursday, about five miles from the wreck. These two men, Lee Ai Hwei and Uan Yong Kan, were the only crewmembers recovered. Two life rafts were seen, though neither appeared to have been occupied at any time after the capsizing.

After Navy divers struggled to enter the wreck, the U.S. Coast Guard summoned Alaska salvage expert and diver Del Hansen. On Saturday, four days after the capsizing, he became the first diver to enter the Lee Wang Zin. Fighting against the turbulent water, he said, “I got flipped upside down, just like a leaf in the wind. It was like getting flushed down a toilet.” When he emerged, he was shocked that the supposedly firmly beached ship had moved 200 yards.

While there was little hope for survivors, the scene inside was still disappointing. “I looked at a great deal of ragged, tattered, ripped up steel,” said Hansen. “There was no wheelhouse, the upper decks were all gone, and a good portion of the boiler room was opened up. The staterooms were opened up. The galley was intact and I took a long look in there and there was nobody in it.” In all, there were no air pockets, no survivors, no bodies. The 30 souls aboard that Christmas morning were almost certainly all swept into the ocean.

While underwater, Hansen also attached a tow line, though the ship preferred to make its own course in the world. The plan was to tow the ship to deeper water in the Gulf of Alaska and sink the derelict farther from shore. On its way west, late in the following afternoon, the tow line broke. The U.S. Coast Guard attempted to sink it the hard way with 16 rounds of cannon fire into the hull, but the willful, upside-down vessel remained afloat. So, Hansen was summoned again, and he reattached the tow line from the freighter to the tug Salvage Chief on New Year’s Eve.

On Jan. 1, 1980, the Lee Wang Zin suddenly began to sink while being towed, still about 50 miles from its destination. An observer on the scene noted, “As soon as it started to sink, the winches started to back up. It burnt out the winch motor and started to tow the Salvage Chief back at 20 to 30 knots.” In less than a minute, the freighter was gone, in its final resting place 23 miles west of Dall Island.

Apart from the 30 dead sailors and a recalcitrant carcass of a ship, there was also the pollution. When the wreck was first sighted that Christmas day, it was already leaking large quantities of oil. Canadian Coast Guard reported an oil slick 10 miles long and two miles wide. By Friday, three days after the freighter capsized, the oil had spread 18 miles from the wreck, covering about 100 square miles of open water. That same day, Alaska State Troopers reported oil along the coast of Prince of Wales Island from Kendrick Bay to Cholomondeley Sound.

The Lee Wang Zin carried two types of fuel. During normal service, the freighter burned heavy oil that was not much different from crude oil. Andy Spear of the Department of Environmental Conservation described the bunker fuel as “thick and gooey. It doesn’t break up easily in heavy seas, it forms globules and coats things.”

Winds from the south and southeast prodded the oil north; there were no reports of oil on the Canadian side of the border. On Dec. 31, Petersburg gillnetter reported “coffee-mug sized black globules spun streaks into a sheen” in the islands above Thorne Head. Reports of oil came from as far north as Port Alexander. In all, the wreck of the freighter released somewhere between 2,400 to more than 7,000 barrels of bunker fuel and diesel oil into the waters of Alaska, contaminating 350 miles of shoreline.

Cleanup efforts lasted four months at Kendrick Bay and Caamano Point, as more than 100 individuals from a collection of agencies labored on the oiled beaches. Per Coast Guard Lt. Jim Curtain, “It all had to be done manually. We used everything, rakes, shovels, and our hands.” There was no attempt to recover oil from the water. The federal government sued the Lee Wang Zin owners and charter company for the $2.2 million in cleanup costs, not that they would recover it. The freighter’s owners went so far as to claim there were no adverse impacts from the spill, only perhaps some cosmetic infringements upon Southeast Alaska.

Alaska Review was Alaska’s first statewide public affairs television show, first airing in 1976. A 1980 episode of the series featured the Lee Wang Zin in a lengthy segment, which can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube.

The Lee Wang Zin oil spill was the largest in Alaska history before the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989, with a little qualification. In two separate incidents, both in 1987, the T/V Stuyvesant released more oil, albeit along an area stretching roughly from Sitka to Oregon. Stormy weather in the Gulf of Alaska caused cracks in the Stuyvesant’s hull, allowing the North Slope crude to leak during the journey south. The tanker was subsequently removed from Alaska service.

In a Nov. 25, 1958 election to determine the first governor of Alaska, Bill Egan defeated John Butrovich with 61% of the vote. Butrovich (1910-1997) will be more familiar to more aged Alaskans as the longtime territorial and state senator.

Key sources:

“$2 Million Cleanup Costs Sought in 1979 Lee Wang Zin Shipwreck.” Anchorage Daily News, March 19, 1981, C-1.

Bayliss, Randolph, and Raymond Spoltman. “The Wreck of the Lee Wang Zin.” International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings 1981, no. 1 (1981): 221-226.

“Captain of Ill-Fated Ore Carrier OK’d Fatal Load.” Anchorage Times, February 12, 1980, B-6.

“Capsized Lee Wang Zin Sinks to Watery Grave.” Anchorage Daily News, January 2, 1980, A-3.

“Christmas Ship Mishap Investigated.” Anchorage Times, January 15, 1980, A-4.

Ervasti, Rozinne. “Drifting Freighter is Again Under Tow for Open Ocean.” Anchorage Daily News, January 1, 1980, C-1.

Ervasti, Roxinne. “Freighter Will Be Sunk.” Anchorage Times, December 30, 1980, A-1, A-2.

Esser, Doug. “Search for Freighter Survivors Halted.” Anchorage Daily News, December 29, 1979, A-4.

Esser, Doug. “Second Body Recovered; Ore Freighter Beached.” Anchorage Daily News, December 28, 1979, A-3.

“Ketchikan Diver Key Figure in Freighter Search, Towing Efforts.” Anchorage Daily News, January 1, 1980, C-1.

“Telephone Call Might Have Saved Ship Crew.” Anchorage Daily News, January 17, 1980, A-3.

Transport Canada. Report of the Investigation into the Capsizing of the Panamanian Ore Carrier MV Lee Wang Zin on Dec. 25, 1979. Ottawa: Transport Canada, Marine Casualty Investigations, 1980.

Whitney, John. Southeastern Alaska Oceanographic Conditions and NOAA’s Twenty-One Year Spill Response History (1979-2000). Anchorage: NOAA, Office of Response and Restoration, Hazardous Materials Response and Assessment Division, 2001.