EDITOR’S NOTE: Early on March 24, 1989, Dean Fosdick, the Alaska bureau chief of The Associated Press, was awakened around 5:30 a.m. by a phone call. The caller had a tip that a tanker had run aground outside Valdez.

Fosdick quickly confirmed with a top Coast Guard official that the Exxon Valdez had struck a reef and was leaking thick, toxic crude oil into Prince William Sound, and sent out first word to the world of what at the time was the nation’s worst-ever oil spill.