Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster focuses primarily on the reasons behind both the spill and its slow cleanup, however, rather than on the inherently dangerous consequences of oil production and shipment. To reinforce this assertion that safety regulations, not the oil industry per se, caused this horrendous disaster and its catastrophic consequences, the film provides a reenactment of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker catastrophe, from the moments before the tanker ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, rupturing its storage tanks and spilling millions of gallons of oil, through its devastating aftermath.
According to Los Angeles Times staff writer, Susan King, “the behind-the-scenes catastrophes after the mammoth oil spill… shocked the British creative team of HBO’s docudrama Dead Ahead.” The film’s researcher-writer Michael Baker and executive producer Leslie Woodhead called the disaster “a black comedy” (King) because of the neglect and greed of oil and pipeline companies, and the disastrous choices made by the Coast Guard, the EPA, and the first Bush Administration.
As King declares, the film “depicts the bureaucracy, fighting, and finger-pointing among officials at Exxon, the Alyeska Pipeline Company…, the Coast Guard, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush Administration, while the spill was left basically unattended for days.” Anger with these multiple groups’ mistakes prompted Baker and Woodhead to move forward with the film. As Woodhead explains, “It is so infuriating, the revelation that the oil laid there for three days in beautiful weather. It was just a tangle of priorities and people trying to tidy up their own images which left the oil lying there in the water” (King). Baker agrees, asserting, “People started kind of blaming each other…. It became a question of controlling the media, not cleaning up the oil, but controlling the spill as an event” (King).
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