‘Fishing Is All We Have’ : Alaska Bay at the Front in Oil Fight

To the thousands who net the huge Pacific salmon that inhabit Bristol Bay and its tributary rivers in southwestern Alaska, fishing is a matter of survival.

In the frenzy of the summer salmon season, fishermen have been known to brandish guns and ram each others’ boats as they compete for a catch that will sustain them when the waters turn to ice and the harbor closes for the long, bitter winter.

The massive catch on the bay, which measures roughly 250 miles at its widest point, nets a year’s livelihood: cash earned from sales to nearby canneries and meals for months to come on salmon that has been dried or frozen.

“If we lost our fish here, I would guess it wouldn’t take more than five years for us to become a ghost town, along with about nine villages on the Nushagak River,” said Dillingham Mayor Leon Braswell, 40, a fisherman who wears blue jeans and work boots to the unmarked wooden building that is Dillingham City Hall. “Fishing is all we have.”

Few Confident of Success

Now, after fending off intrusions of foreign fishermen and successfully demanding better prices from the canneries, Braswell and the people of Dillingham are attempting a feat that few believe can succeed.

They are fighting to prevent oil companies from punching holes in the bottom of Bristol Bay, a step that environmentalists and fishermen view as part of a calculated effort by the oil companies to set the stage for drilling in other areas now off limits to them for environmental or political reasons.

In particular, some feel that what happens in Alaska’s Bristol Bay, situated on the western side of the Alaska Peninsula just north of the Aleutian Islands, could have a direct impact on the continuing struggle over offshore drilling in California.

“Bristol Bay could be the wedge that gets them into California,” said Jerry Liboff, 39, a fisherman here. “If they could crack it here, they’ve got the muscle, the arguments and the politics to go into other controversial places.”

Department’s Decision

The U.S. Interior Department has tentatively decided to permit the oil industry to drill next year in a 5.6-million-acre site in Bristol Bay.

The plan represents a key test of Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel’s willingness to buck environmentalist opposition as he tries to forge ahead with the federal government’s offshore leasing program, which suffered significant political setbacks under the direction of former Secretary James G. Watt.

What makes Alaska tempting as a vehicle for prying open the door to offshore drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, critics say, is the fact that the 49th state wields substantially less political clout than more populous states such as California. Industry officials concede that even the harsh seas and frigid temperatures of the north are easier to overcome than opposition to drilling from California’s powerful congressional delegation. With a population of only 479,000, Alaska has one member in the House of Representatives. California, with a population of 25 million, has 45.

For people here, the Bristol Bay struggle matches California’s battle in the intensity of local feelings, though, unlike California, there is little talk about aesthetics for the sake of tourism or concern about air pollution. Rather, it is fear of an oil spill that would destroy the fish and the economy of this windblown region that natives call “the bush.”

If finished next month, the plan would place oil exploration at the side of the nation’s largest salmon fishery, the state’s largest herring fishery and the home or migration corridor of a million marine mammals. The entire Pacific gray whale population travels through nearby waters twice a year.

Safety Record Cited

The oil industry says fishing and oil exploration can co-exist, and points to a relatively good safety record in other waters off this state.

“There is no one who is reasonable and fair who will tell you there won’t be accidents,” conceded Thomas Cook, the Alaska exploration representative of Chevron U.S.A. Inc. “But I think industry’s record is very good. Even catastrophes like the Santa Barbara blowout (of 1969) had only a temporary effect and didn’t eliminate fishing or do any permanent damage to the environment.”

“If the oil companies get a go-ahead to explore in such a sensitive and tremendously productive area like Bristol Bay, they can go anywhere, including California,” said Sue Flensburg, a planner with a coastal management agency here. “It’s become a political issue for them.”

Alaska Gov. Bill Sheffield strongly opposes the offshore leasing plan, a position that pits the state against an industry that has made Alaska rich. Oil revenues finance 85% of the state budget. Oil money made it possible for Alaska to abolish its state personal income tax in 1980. Indeed, the oil industry generates so much money that every resident receives an annual payment--this year $404--from interest earned off oil revenues.

Threat of Lawsuit

But the state has threatened to sue the federal government unless it delays exploration in Bristol Bay for 10 years.

“Obviously, it’s not that we’re against oil and gas,” Sheffield said in an interview in his Juneau office. “We’ve had a very good working relationship with the oil and gas industry. But on Bristol Bay, we just had to draw the line.”

Fishing in Bristol Bay is a $1 billion-a-year industry that employs 10,000 workers seasonally. Unlike onshore drilling in Prudhoe Bay to the north, which is in state territory with royalties paid directly to the state, a discovery in the federal waters off Bristol Bay would add little to Alaska’s pocketbook.

Prudhoe Bay production is expected to peak in the next couple of years and decline after that. The state, therefore, is anxious to nourish and sustain its other industries, such as fishing, to fill the vacuum when the oil is gone.

“You don’t have oil spawn and come back and reproduce,” Sheffield said. “Oil will run out sometime, hopefully not for a long time. But fishing, if we manage it right, will be around forever.”

Hodel went to King Salmon, a town near here, to preside over a hearing on the Bristol Bay plan in June before flying to California for hearings on offshore exploration there. More than 100 residents, many speaking native Eskimo dialects, told him of their dependence on fishing.

990 Tracts Identified

On Sept. 6, after returning to Washington, Hodel issued a notice of proposed sale to lease 990 nine-square-mile tracts in Bristol Bay. He is expected to decide late next month whether to proceed with the sale of the 10-year leases in January.

No lease sale is scheduled in California for the next two years. After the California hearings, Hodel abandoned a plan to open up 150 tracts off the state’s shore, saying the proposal would have tapped too little oil.

In Bristol Bay, environmentalists cite Interior Department estimates that the proposed drilling site contains 279 million barrels of oil, a small amount in comparison to other federal offshore areas where drilling is being planned. In a government ranking of hydrocarbon resources, Bristol Bay is rated lower in potential than waters off Southern, Central or Northern California.

Oil company officials say that industry assessments of Bristol Bay’s energy potential are more optimistic than those of the federal government.

Chevron’s Cook said that, if Hodel “caves in” on Bristol Bay, “We’d have some very serious concerns as to whether there is any credibility” in the federal offshore leasing program.

Past Wells Unproductive

Oil companies have sunk more than $5 billion into dry holes in federal waters off Alaska since 1976. “We’ve invested a lot of money in this state, and we need to find oil to replace our investment,” said an industry official based in Anchorage.

However, few residents here believe that oil companies can operate safely in the high seas and strong gales that have claimed the lives of many of their family members and regularly force boats to scurry for protective inlets.

During the last few years, oil companies have plucked natives and village officials from these shores and flown them to Louisiana and Texas for all-expenses-paid excursions intended to show that oil operations will not harm fishing. Some who took the trips and visited industry research offices in Houston and fished off derricks in Louisiana returned mollified.

But others, like fisherman Harvey Samuelsen, were not convinced.

“Of course they have hurricanes in Louisiana, but they don’t have drifting ice like we have up here,” said Samuelsen, 59, who heads a fisherman’s union here. “Bristol Bay gets some of the worst weather in the world. And, like I tell everybody, this is a national treasure. . . . Bristol Bay feeds a lot of people throughout the world.”

Rich Source of Food

Tens of millions of adult salmon swim through these waters every year, turning lakes red as they migrate upstream to their breeding grounds to spawn and die. It is the potential effect of an oil spill on their offspring that has fishermen scared. State biologists believe that the leasing site may be a major feeding and rearing spot for as many as 1 billion young salmon migrating out to sea.

New Stuyahok, 90 miles northeast of here, is one of many Eskimo villages that depend on this ecological cycle for survival.

“No matter how careful you are, there are always oil spills,” said Ivan Blunka, 75, a village elder, his native Eskimo dialect translated by

an interpreter. “What will happen to our fish? No matter how you protest, the big oil companies with their big money come around. There is no way to stop them.”

The village, on the Nushagak River, consists of a cluster of wooden huts dominated by a Russian Orthodox church with lime-green, onion-shaped domes. Fishing boats line the river’s edge.

Time has brought many changes to New Stuyahok. The random layout of the village is jarred by two neat rows of prefabricated, federally subsidized housing. Television antennas jut out from even the crudest of homes.

Natives Aware of Risks

Village residents cite oil spills they have seen on television. Former Interior Secretary Watt once visited the village, and residents said he was “all smiles” at the time but forgot them when he returned to Washington.

“Hodel is lucky that I did not meet him,” native Greg Moxie, 46, said angrily. “The sea is our income.”

Unlike California, which in the past has responded to large-scale offshore development proposals by successfully seeking congressional approval of a moratorium, Alaska has sought compromise.

In meetings with former Interior Secretary William P. Clark, Watt’s successor, Alaska’s Washington delegation negotiated a scaled-down version of what Watt had proposed for Bristol Bay. The site now scheduled for exploration is 17% the size of the leasing area proposed by Watt, and the three-member Alaska congressional delegation supports the drilling plan.

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said the delegation received the best deal it could have. If oil is discovered, additional environmental studies will be required before production begins, he said.

Many Alaskans Bitter

But many Alaskans, including state officials, are bitter. They complain that Hodel has denied Alaska many of the offshore protections he has offered California.

“They can hardly argue that we’ve behaved like California and balked at every tract,” said Robert Grogan, associate director of the state’s Office of Management and Budget. “Our position has been extremely positive, with the exception of this one area.”

However, Helen Chythlook, 31, whose Eskimo family has depended on fishing for hundreds of years, is resigned to the political realities.

“Those big oil companies, they’re going to win anyway,’ she said in the lilting accent of the natives’ speech. “There are only so many of us out here in the bush.”