March 24 Birthday
March 24, 1989: The Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker, struck Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil. The spill contaminated 1,300 miles of coastline. The cause was human error — the captain, Joseph Hazelwood, was drunk and below deck; the third mate was on the bridge but had been working an excessive shift and was fatigued. Exxon had downsized the crew and cut maintenance. The cleanup took four years and cost $2.5 billion. Some species, like the killer whale population, have never recovered. The legal case — Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker — went to the Supreme Court, which in 2008 reduced the punitive damages from $2.5 billion to $507 million. The Court ruled that punitive damages should not exceed the compensatory damages by a ratio of more than 1:1. Robert Koch announced the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis on March 24, 1882, at a meeting of the Berlin Physiological Society. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in Europe at the time — it killed one in seven people. Koch's discovery proved that TB was caused by a specific bacterium, not by "bad air" or heredity or "consumption" of the body. This was the birth of the germ theory of disease. Koch developed four postulates — criteria for proving that a specific microbe causes a specific disease — that are still used today. March 24 is now World TB Day. TB still kills 1.5 million people a year, mostly in developing countries. A vaccine (BCG) exists but is only partially effective. Drug-resistant TB is a growing crisis. On March 24, 1999, NATO began bombing targets in Yugoslavia — the first time the alliance had used military force in its fifty-year history. The bombing was in response to Serbian forces' campaign of ethnic cleansing against Kosovar Albanians. The campaign lasted seventy-eight days and involved 1,000 aircraft. NATO did not have UN authorization, and Russia and China condemned it. Serbian forces withdrew from Kosovo in June. The bombing set a precedent for humanitarian intervention without UN approval — a precedent that was cited to justify the Iraq War, with very different results. Harry Houdini, born this day in 1874 as Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, could hold his breath for over three minutes and pick any lock. He exposed fraudulent mediums by attending seances in disguise and revealing their tricks. He died on Halloween 1926 of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix — a student had punched him in the stomach to test his claim that he could withstand any blow, and he had not had time to brace. People born on March 24 fall under the zodiac sign of Aries. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 24 include 1882: Robert Koch announces discovery of the tuberculosis bacterium, 1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, 1999: NATO begins bombing of Yugoslavia (first combat in alliance's history). Famous people born on March 24 include Harry Houdini (1874), Steve McQueen (1930), Tommy Hilfiger (1951).