Significant Reduction in Alaska Oil Slick Reported

The Coast Guard reported “significantly less” oil on the water Wednesday after high winds and choppy seas dispersed more of the devastating slick from the tanker Exxon Valdez.

While the forces of nature continued to purge Prince William Sound, man’s own attempts to clean up the 11-million-gallon mess remained stymied by bureaucracy 20 days after the tanker ran aground.

Aboard the state ferry Aurora, a staging platform for the cleanup effort, state Department of Environmental Conservation coordinator Bruce Hoffman was told to sit tight by Exxon and the Coast Guard while experts plotted the slick’s whereabouts and mapped out a plan.

“There’s no reason workers should be sitting idle while there’s so much work to be done,” Hoffman complained. Hildegarde Knopp, one of 80 workers aboard the Aurora, agreed.

“We wait and we watch movies and then we eat, and then we wait and watch movies again,” she said.

The Coast Guard commandant, Adm. Paul Yost, was due to arrive in Valdez today to oversee the cleanup operation at the request of President Bush.

In flyovers Wednesday, scientists detected no immediate danger of oil hitting now-fortified salmon hatcheries or large stretches of shoreline.

The amount of oil coming out of Prince William Sound and into the Gulf of Alaska “has diminished greatly,” said Al Hielscher, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data manager.

But fishermen and environmentalists still worry that fickle spring storms could sweep oil back toward lucrative salmon hatcheries or onto shores teeming with marine life.

Observers already are calling the fouled coves heavily hit by oil “dead zones” because they are so uncustomarily silent and devoid of life.