Red Light to Starboard

Recalling the Exxon Valdez Disaster

Angela Day

Western Writers of America Spur Award Winner

Narrated by Chris Abell

Available from Audible

Book published by Washington State University Press

Red Light to Starboard documents a story that stunned the world—recounting how futile warnings, regional and national history, as well as failed governmental and public policy decisions led to disastrous environmental consequences in a spectacular, fragile ecosystem. Valdez native Bobby Day’s intimate portrayal lends a local perspective and conveys the damage suffered by individuals, communities, and the fishing industry.

Tapping a poignant local voice yet still providing national and historical context, Red Light to Starboard depicts the catastrophe that stunned the world and devastated a spectacular, fragile ecosystem and its bordering communities.

Angela Day writes about the relationship between people and the environment, and the role that regulatory policies and politics play in those relationships. A 2015 winner of the Western Writer's Spur Award, her writing is inspired by travels throughout the American West.

REVIEWS:

“Angela Day's Red Light to Starboard: Recalling the Exxon Valdez Disaster, appearing on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the oil spill in Prince William Sound in Alaska, is a work of love and thorough investigative journalism, delivered with the objectivity of a seasoned analyst.”

—John Senger, in Foreword Reviews

“Angela Day.... with Red Light to Starboard, her informative and highly readable account of the spill as experienced by her husband Bobby Day, a lifelong fisherman in Prince William Sound, and his family who in the 1950s homesteaded the land on which the pipeline terminal would later be built.... To her credit, the author contextualizes the Day family story within the larger history of oil development in Alaska as well as the social and economic changes in the fishing industry that even preceded the spill.”

—Ross Coen, in Alaska History

“Published just weeks before the 25th anniversary of the oil spill, Angela Day's book achieves a synthesis at the convergence of several themes and experiences. .... I doubt that anybody could have written Red Light to Starboard much before the spill's 25th anniversary. The passage of nearly a human generation of time has allowed the devastating short-term effects of the spill to be understood in a wider context.”

—Dave Norton, in The Polar Times

“This book was hard to put down...a wonderfully told tale, rich with characters who leap off the pages... Readers will come away with a healthy skepticism for extractive industries, their relationship to government regulators, and the costs that often are paid in the search for mineral and oil/gas wealth.”

—Edward P. Weber, Ulysses Dubach Professor of Political Science, School of Public Policy at Oregon State University

“An absorbing read... a personal and immediate account of the impacts of the spill on real people in real circumstances.”

—Max S. Power, author of American's Nuclear Wastelands