Lure of Big Bucks Changing Culture : In Alaska After Spill, Life Feels Out of Kilter

Four months after the nation’s largest oil spill blackened Prince William Sound, Alaska has become a state that has lost its equilibrium.

People who used to make money aren’t. Those who used to be on the outs--itinerants and part-time workers--are making big bucks.

Fishermen who operate from boats have all but been shut down, while those who string nets close to shore are making millions.

Lives Turned Inside Out

In the remote villages of native Alaskans, the rhythm of life has been turned inside out. Instead of putting up salmon and gathering firewood for the winter, the natives are collecting oil from the beaches for $16 an hour.

Mental health clinics here and in Homer, Kenai and Valdez report huge increases in their caseloads, which they attribute to stress and depression induced by the spill. Local police say family quarrels and crime are on the rise.

“The whole process is turned upside down,” observed Wayne Coleman, oil spill coordinator for the city of Kodiak. “It’s a social situation as well as a financial situation.”

No one knows when the state will regain its sense of balance.

But local residents and officials from police chiefs to mental health workers worry that when the snows of winter fly, matters could grow worse.

That, they said, is when the lucrative cleanup stops and people will have long winter nights to think about the summer of their discontent.

“We see a two-class system,” said Thia Falcone, program director for the Kodiak Women’s Resource and Crisis Center. “People who were able to work on the oil spill, clean up.” The people who didn’t won’t, she said, adding: “I think there’s going to be some real interesting conflicts. I think it’s already started.”

The signs of communities in distress are everywhere.

From Kodiak Island and Homer on the Cook Inlet to Cordova in Prince William Sound, the salmon fleets lie at anchor.

Valdez, on the other hand, has become a boom town. Almost overnight, a tent city sprang up as a flood of Alaskans from a state suffering a long-term economic downturn rushed in to grab cleanup jobs that paid an almost unheard of $16.69 an hour.

Some fishermen were chartered by Exxon and its principal contractor, VECO, for $2,500 a day or more for the growing cleanup armada. Others were left out, either because their boats weren’t needed or didn’t fit the task.

Animosity Grows

Already there are reports of building animosity between fishermen who got Exxon charters and those who didn’t.

“I think people are going to be looking each other in the eye this winter and asking, ‘What did you do when Exxon was here,’ ” Valdez radio station owner Pat Lynn said.

Arrests are up. The town’s small jail is so crowded that the judge is making reservations this winter for those already sentenced. Until then, the court is allowing the guilty to continue to make money while they can. So far, 60 defendants have been sentenced to serve a total of 2,549 days behind bars, and there are another 150 cases pending. The jail can hold 16 prisoners.

Alaska has long known boom and bust cycles, from the gold rush days to the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay. During the Prudhoe Bay boom there was time to plan ahead, build the housing and provide the services.

But when the Exxon Valdez sailed from Valdez and struck Bligh reef on that fateful morning of March 24, there was no time to plan.

Exxon and the Alyeska oil consortium that operates the pipeline were not prepared for a spill of 11 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude into the pristine Alaskan waters.

And the small communities that owed much of their livelihood to the sea were not prepared for the social and economic upheaval.

About 110 miles northeast of Kodiak Island on the Cook Inlet, Mark Mahan sits on the “Lucy Nell,” tied up at the boat harbor in Homer. Mahan has been a drift net fisherman for five years. It’s been a good living. Until now.

“I haven’t even put a net in the water this year,” he said.

Normally at this time of year, fishermen would be casting their nets into the cold, deep waters of the Cook Inlet, the Shelikof Strait and Prince William Sound and pulling up hundreds of tons of glistening salmon. Last year, 44 million salmon valued at nearly $300 million were caught.

But the state has declared a “zero tolerance” policy--no fish will leave for market if there is even the slightest chance that the catch has been tainted by oil. To do otherwise would threaten the state’s fishing industry for years to come.

Payments to Fishermen

So far, Exxon has paid the Kodiak salmon boats $15,000 each toward their losses this year from the oil spill. Additional payments are being negotiated.

But the payment formula is controversial. The payments are based on a salmon price of $1.40 a pound. Fishermen got an average $2.95 last year. Exxon says the price cut has to do with the exchange rate between the Japanese yen and the dollar, and the fact that last year’s big catch is still overhanging this year’s market.

“I sat at the computer yesterday figuring up my income this year,” Mahan said. “It’s nothing. My season was just over $50,000 for the year and we made that in one day last year. Instead of going fishing, you’re standing in lines at the claims office and battling people.”

A little farther north up the Cook Inlet near Kenai, the fishing couldn’t be better.

For the past two weeks, the Fred Sturman family, along with 1,200 other set netters from Homer to Anchorage, has been hauling in their set nets in what all agree has been their biggest year in decades.

Set nets are stretched like a tennis net just beneath the surface between two poles anchored to the ocean floor near the shoreline, 210 feet apart. And unlike many parts of the sound, oil has not been found where the set nets are anchored.

The fish were so thick during the peak of the run two weeks ago that the water was churned to a froth. Said Sturman: “You could hear them when they hit your prop. Thunk. Thunk.”

Sturman said his catch is up 30% over last year. They caught 40,000 pounds of salmon from four nets in 24 hours. Down the beach, Lars Frostad says his catch has doubled.

There are several reasons for the record catch, Sturman said. There were more returning salmon this year. More importantly, the drift net fishermen were shut down, first around Kodiak and then in the Cook Inlet because of the oil spill. Usually, the drift net fleets get about 60% of the catch, he said.

At the Kodiak Island Mental Health Center, the number of new cases jumped 120% in the last couple of months over this time last year. The number of calls to the crisis intervention line has gone up even faster.

In Homer, mental health workers report a 75% increase in their caseload. In Valdez, the number of new clients has tripled over this time last year.

While they cannot be sure, mental health workers believe that the huge swing in their caseloads can be linked to the oil spill.

“Something is very different. People are feeling very rattled. People on the edge have slid a little further,” Kodiak therapist Paul Ruff said.

“It’s some sort of depression reaction. More than that, I think there’s a general sort of malaise in the community. It’s . . . a sense of despair that adds to whatever issues people are already suffering in their own life.”

“I think a lot of people feel really displaced,” said Bob Donald, director of the Valdez Counseling Center.

David Wagner, executive director of the counseling service in Homer, said: “There is a definite increase in overall anxiety. People are wondering what’s going to happen to me. Most of those people are saying they’re fishermen or employed by some industry specifically affected.”

Nowhere is the strain on communities more apparent than in Valdez. The town’s 3,500 population has more than quadrupled to 16,000. While the average monthly wage in the state was $2,308 in 1987, oil spill workers could make $1,800 in a week.

Not since the Klondike gold rush of 1898 has there been such a sudden and unexpected influx of people.

Almost overnight, tent cities sprang up. During the past four months, tents have been erected on the main street where vendors are selling everything from furs and souvenir T-shirts to bottled concoctions that when taken internally are said to prevent the detection of drugs in the body.

That is one of the biggest selling items, because Exxon’s principal contractor, VECO, has begun widespread drug testing and workers are being fired if they test positive.

The few hotels in town have been booked solid. Restaurants and bars are doing a land office business.

“On March 24 I knew everybody in town. On March 25 it seemed like I was a stranger. I didn’t know anybody,” said Lynn, who runs one of the town’s two radio stations, KVAK.

At the same time, many Valdez residents quit their low-paying jobs to go to work on the spill, leaving local businesses from restaurants to the weekly newspaper shorthanded.

Exxon and VECO have built temporary offices and barracks with such rapidity that building permits weren’t obtained until after they were well under construction.

Local residents worry that when the oil spill workers leave, the excess housing will drive down rental prices and make it even more difficult to sell homes. All of this is likely to be a hot issue during the October City Council election campaign.

During April, May and June, drunken driving arrests jumped to 73, compared with 17 in the same period last year. Traffic tickets climbed to 208 from 35. There were 257 arrests compared with 93 a year ago and 2,197 calls to the local police department, nearly double the calls received a year ago.

Local residents and city officials worry about what the winter will bring.

“We’re waiting for the big swarms of people coming back from the beaches. They’ll have pockets full of money and they’re going to want to blow off some steam,” said Mike Jakiemiec, editor of the local weekly, the Valdez Vanguard.

Police Chief Bert Cottle reported that violent crimes are on the rise as the oil cleanup winds down. Tensions, already high, are expected to heighten.

At the same time, Valdez City Manager Doug Griffin said many residents are offended by the tight security that Exxon has brought in. There are guards everywhere, at office buildings, including those occupied by state environmental agencies, in front of otter and bird recovery centers, at the airport. Workers staying in quarters supplied by VECO must wear badges.

“It gives you a feeling we’re under siege, that the city is occupied by occupying forces,” Griffin said.

Still, many here give Exxon credit for doing what it can to alleviate the difficulties. Not only is Exxon reimbursing fishermen, it is reimbursing the city for many of its costs and is considering reimbursement for mental health services.

Exxon community liaison manger Monte Taylor said the oil company so far has spent $5 million reimbursing local communities for their costs directly related to the spill.

“We’re trying to do what we can,” Taylor said.

Karluk village, population 60, on the coast of Kodiak Island is the picture of remote Alaska. The only sounds are the roll of the surf, the wind, the splash of salmon jumping on their way to Karluk Lake 25 miles upstream.

There are no roads here. Karluk can be reached only by boat or chartered plane.

Normally the natives would be smoking salmon and gathering fuel wood for the approaching winter. Instead they have been hired by Exxon to work 9-to-5 jobs gleaning oily rocks and kelp from the shoreline near their village.

For a number of the residents, the $16.69 hourly wage is a bonanza. Many of them have never been paid so much, or paid at all.

But there has been a price.

Natives say they are worried about the effect on children when both parents are cleaning beaches instead of being home.

They worry, too, about the possible toxic effects of oil on fish. They worry about a winter dependent on overpriced, outdated groceries at the village store. They worry about using driftwood to heat their homes because it has been oiled and might produce toxic fumes.

Anthropologist Rachel Mason, who has visited five of the six native Alaskan villages on Kodiak Island since the spill, said: “The summer life has been disrupted greatly just by the fact of employment. People aren’t used to having 9-to-5 jobs.

“There’s a lot of anxiety on what happens this winter. And existing problems are exaggerated, such as factionalism between families,” Mason said.

One native, Dolly Reft, said: “Our spirits have been broken. We’re exhausted mentally, physically. Normally, I would have had fish put up. I would have clams smoked and canned. I would have had deer in my freezer. There’s none of that,” said Reft, who now resides in Kodiak in order to build a coalition to plead the native Alaskan cause.

Some think that Reft exaggerates and describe her as a troublemaker. But Mason said that “the subsistence life style is all the natives in Kodiak have left of their traditional culture. For that ideal, this oil spill has been devastating.”

On one recent day evidence of the spill’s clash with traditions was clearly visible. On one shoreline, crews of men and women from the village were busy shoveling oiled rocks and gravel into heavy plastic bags.

On another shoreline, fishing boats were serving as waste scows.

On yet another shoreline, Emil Malutin, 63, helped fasten oil absorbing “pon-poms” to a long rope that is dragged through the water to pick up oil.

Malutin, who has lived in Karluk 40 years, carries himself with the dignity of a man who has lived long and worked hard. Wrinkles line his face. His smile is without guile. His hands are bent and gnarled.

He struggled with his arthritic hands to fasten the pon-poms. “Oh,” he laughed, “these fingers just don’t work right any more.” A visitor asked if he had put up salmon for the winter.

“Mostly just haven’t had time,” he said. He looked out across the mouth of the Karluk River and caught a glimpse of a salmon jumping on its way to its spawning ground.

The old man said nothing. He continued about his business, doing his part to clean up the nation’s worst oil spill.