Alaska Faults Exxon’s Oil Spill Cleanup Effort

The state of Alaska has characterized the Exxon oil spill cleanup as a failure, saying it has left oil on beaches and that animals continue to die five months after the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground.

Coast Guard officials overseeing the Exxon cleanup said Thursday that they were studying the state’s assessment, but Exxon officials rejected the state’s harsh critique of the cleanup that is winding down toward a Sept. 15 quitting date.

No shoreline has been fully cleaned of oil, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said in a letter to the Coast Guard.

Exxon cleanup manager Otto Harrison responded that the cleanup of nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil from the March 24 accident will be finished on target by mid-September, when the weather begins to turn bad.

He said Exxon will “leave all shorelines in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska ‘environmentally stable’ so that no threat remains to wildlife, fish or persons subsisting from these resources.”

All state agencies agree that Exxon “has not met this objective nor are they likely to achieve it before the winter season,” Steve Provant, the state’s on-scene coordinator, said in a letter to Rear Adm. David Ciancaglini, the federal on-scene coordinator.

The state reiterated its position that Exxon must maintain a winter cleanup strike force beyond Sept. 15 and that Exxon must return next year to finish the job.