Oil Spill Shatters Valdez’s Quiet Life in Remote Alaska

Not a drop of spilled oil stains the sparkling waters of this harbor on Prince William Sound. The stain here is well ashore.

“They are turning our village into a shantytown,” said Tom McAlister, the town’s fire marshal.

That is one of the milder sentiments you hear these days from the 2,500 residents of Valdez. Theirs is, or was, a gentle village that fate seems to have picked on over the years for more than its share of bad luck.

Valdez is the terminal of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Its shores were untouched by the worst-ever American oil spill, but it will be linked forever, its villagers believe, with the name of the tanker that spilled the oil.

The tanker Exxon Valdez filled its enormous hull here but let its 11 million gallons out where it ran aground.

Now Valdez has become the staging ground for the thousands trying to clean up the mess and other thousands looking to help do it at wages that seem to be causing a sort of fever in Valdez.

Flood of People

People are swarming here from all over. Some villagers are comparing the effect on their town to that of the 1964 earthquake. An exaggeration, of course, because that horror so shook Valdez that the entire citizenry had to pack up and move 10 miles away and start all over.

“Well,” said Pat Lynn, “that’s just what I sometimes feel like doing. Just look at it.”

His gesture takes in clusters of tents pitched on the hillsides; temporary housing in the shape of boxcars, left over from pipeline construction crews, stuck on every flat place and stacked up at the harbor until other flat places can be found; traffic jams and honking horns; camper vehicles parked helter-skelter because there is no room in the designated lots; people standing in lines--for a meal or a drink or a shower at the high school gym, for free, or at a truck stop to get wet for a dollar a minute.

“It’s a damn circus,” said Lynn.

One-Person Radio Station

Pat Lynn runs a one-person radio station, one of America’s smallest. It’s typical of a Valdez enterprise--small, unambitious, sufficient to serve a town this size. He took a 75% cut in income to move to Valdez from busy Anchorage.

“Now we have suddenly become a city of 8,000 transients,” he said.

“Our sense of intimacy has been fractured. Our quiet way of living has been torn away from us. Our crime rate has gone up. Our mayor told me the other day he had to go looking for his house key. He had never needed it before.

“All the reasons we chose to live in Valdez, out here in all this isolated beauty, have been shattered, maybe beyond repair.

“It’s going to take forever to clean up the oil, if it can be cleaned up, which I doubt. So who knows how long it will take for Valdez to be Valdez again, or whether it ever will be?”

There is no question that the shock was sudden and dramatic.

On the first day after the March 24 spill, for example, the little Valdez airstrip, which didn’t even have a control tower, had to handle 800 takeoffs and landings. For the month of April, it handled 8,417, comparable to Chicago’s O’Hare airport, one of the nation’s busiest.

No question, either, that the impact has been all the more jarring because of the serene natural beauty of this northeastern corner of Prince William Sound.

‘Little Switzerland’

Alaskans call Valdez “little Switzerland.” Herman Ruess, an airplane pilot who left Switzerland to come here, said the description is apt.

Ruess will take you to the face of the sound’s 17 glaciers and let you watch them cast great chunks of ice into the sea, a phenomenon called calving, creation still in progress.

Ruess likes to take the scenic route from Valdez back to his base in Anchorage. He banks his airplane low over ice-strewn waters, looking for seals, finding them.

“No houses, no highways, no nothing,” he said, grinning. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Mountains, sculpted by ice and the ages, embrace Valdez on three sides.

The winter snowfall, 300 inches or more, never quite leaves the peaks. It lingers in crevasses and shaded pockets like milk poured from a dipper.

Yosemite of Ice

Lower on the slopes, emerald-green alder and cottonwood surround cascades of snowmelt, waterfalls that nourish heather and lupine and wild strawberries. In the winter the waterfalls freeze in mid-flow. Climbers who come here call Valdez the Yosemite of ice.

“I think one reason the oil spill so upset people in the Lower 48,” said Joe Leahy, a Valdez resident, “is because even if they never have a chance to come to Alaska they like to know that it’s here. I know I felt that way when I lived in Cleveland.”

Leahy is the curator of the Valdez Museum. Not too many towns of 2,500 have a museum of this one’s scope, but Valdez has a history deserving of it, a history, Leahy said, that reassures him. In his mind there is a certain Valdez spirit that will enable it to recover from its current woe.

“We here are sort of different,” he said. “We don’t exactly fit in elsewhere. We gravitated to Valdez because people are not so judgmental about other people’s quirks and personalities because we have our own. We’re all more or less kindred.

“What gives us our tenacity is that if Valdez were to disappear, we wouldn’t have many places left to go.”

Leahy moved to Valdez from Juneau five years ago. He left there not because he saw it grow from 15,000 to 30,000, but because the owner of a hardware store where he had done business for 13 years all of a sudden required two pieces of identification to take his check.

“It’s our mutual trust and intimacy that we hope not to lose in Valdez,” Leahy said.

Valdez became a place on naval charts in 1790 when a Spanish explorer, Salvador Fidalgo, saw the port’s exquisite beauty and named it for his boss--just as Captain James Cook named Prince William Sound for his.

It remained only that, a name on a map, until 1898 when gold-seekers docked here to take a shortcut to the Klondike over an Indian trail across the Valdez Glacier. Many of them decided halfway across the rugged ice that no amount of gold was worth the trip and came back. Before long Valdez became a town of more than 4,500.

When the gold boom died, Valdez survived. But for decade after decade, misfortune seemed to visit little Valdez with uncommon regularity--mostly fires, sometimes disease. Somehow it managed to settle into a close-knit community with schools and churches and a fishing fleet and a way of life that sturdy folk with an eye for nature’s gifts found attractive.

Then, in 1964, America’s worst earthquake struck. It recorded a magnitude of 8.5 and its epicenter was in Prince William Sound. It destroyed Valdez. It left the ground under what remained of the town so unstable that everybody had to move to a more solid foundation 10 miles away.

They brought with them the town fire bell, which had saved many of them, and the oaken bar from the Pinzon Saloon, which had succored many more. Both are in Joe Leahy’s museum. They laid out a new town with broad streets and grand old trees where bald eagles nested.

The new Valdez prospered--especially when it was chosen as the terminal of the oil pipeline.

“But the town always knew that the oil bonanza could end someday, just as the gold bonanza did,” Leahy said.

So when Valdez rebuilt, it put its chips not on oil but on tourism. Fifty cruise ships tie up every summer at Valdez, and hundreds of visitors, awed by the scenery and the town’s hospitality, come ashore for about a three-hour stay. Other tourists motor here in campers and stay longer. All in all, Valdez hosts about 100,000 sightseers a year.

The largest item on the town budget is for beautification--flowers, trees, grass.

“Look at it now,” said Leahy. “Cyclone fences with barbed wire on top. We never allowed that before, but Exxon seems to need it. Security guards are at every building where Exxon has rented office space. Security guards! In Valdez!

“A stand of trees has been bulldozed to make room for those temporary barracks and other equipment. Well. Eagles used to perch there. An eagle won’t sit on an Exxon radio tower or satellite dish.

“If what the tourists see here is chaos, they certainly won’t recommend an Alaska cruise to their neighbors. The people with campers will stay away, too, when word gets around on the CB radio circuit that there’s no place to park.”

There is, in fact, no place to park. Or to sleep. Where will Valdez accommodate the seasonal workers who come every summer to operate the fish-processing plants? Nobody knows. But, then, there might not be much fish processing this year. The oil spill has eliminated commercial fishing in the most productive salmon area of Prince William Sound.

$25 an Hour to Clean Up Oil

Some in Valdez, of course, benefit from the spill.

A local joke, alluding to the charges against the skipper of the Exxon Valdez, is that Exxon is spending money like a drunken sailor.

The company pays up to $25 an hour, counting the overtime, to help clean up the oil. A fisherman can get $1,000 a day for the use of his boat to go skim oil. So why fish? One Valdezian, a lab technician, appalled at the largess, earned $2,700 for a week’s work and donated most of it to the Prince William Sound Conservation Alliance for lobbying against oil interests.

In Valdez, rooms in private homes are going for $100 a night, a mattress on the floor for $50. At one restaurant the menu was reprinted. Same menu, higher prices. The Pipeline Club, a popular place for dinner, doubled its staff but not its prices and doubled its profits. It now serves breakfast and lunch as well as dinner and keeps the bar open from 8 a.m. until 5 a.m., when state law said it must close.

On the day of the spill, a woman from Fairbanks drove 350 miles to a Valdez trailer park where she rents out her camper for $60 a night from each of four people, two to a bed. No toilet. Jackie Robb, the manager of the Valdez branch bank, posted signs asking campers please not to use the parking lot as a restroom.

Valdez had never had a fast-food joint. Now it has. A trailer with a window in the side pulled up near the dock with three signs: “Burger King,” “Open” and “Help Wanted.”

Tom McAlister, the fire marshal, has postponed his retirement plans. “I can’t leave the town like this,” he said. “I just can’t.” His wife, Gloria, said she has to wait dinner for Tom every night, sometimes until midnight.

Joe Michaud, the police chief, has his hands full as well.

Crime on Rise

He has been too busy to compile the figures for May and June, but in April he recorded 81 arrests. Last April he recorded 15. Last year the Valdez ambulance answered 20 calls, this year, so far, 44. Drunk drivers all of last year totaled three. So far this year, more than 20.

“I certainly understand people going where they can to find a job,” said Michaud. “I’ve done that myself. And 90% of these people cause no trouble even though just being here is a real strain on the town.

“We will get through this. We will handle it.”

Yes. But it does seem unfair that the little village destroyed by America’s worst earthquake must endure the anguish of America’s worst oil spill.

“It is unfair,” said Pat Lynn. “Because the earthquake was nature’s doing. This was man’s.”