Year After Spill at Valdez: ‘How Clean Is Clean?’

Bryan Trimm crouched in his awkward survival suit and dipped a finger in the iridescent gray liquid. “Oil,” said the geologist, holding up his lubricated digit for inspection.

To get to the goo, he had punched a hole through rock-crusted asphalt blanketing a nameless beach on the east coast of this uninhabited island in Prince William Sound.

Farther up the shore, other workers dug more holes, shoveling 8, 10, 12 inches deep before coming to the bottom of the tarry oil layer. Over a rise, a marsh lay so heavily matted with oil that it reminded one viewer of a toxic dump.

People and nature have had a year to cope with the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Some areas now show few signs of the oil that soaked them, but others still bear gooey scars from the night last March 24 when the supertanker Exxon Valdez strayed out of normal shipping lanes and ripped open its hull on rocky Bligh Reef.

Despite Exxon’s $2-billion, 12,000-person cleanup and harsh winter storms that scrubbed some dirty beaches clean, fishermen say dead sea otters still sometimes wash onto beaches. And just last week, state regulators said the waters around Eleanor Island--recently cited by Exxon as one of its cleanup success stories--are too dirty to fish for shrimp.

With the weather letting up, Alaskans await resumption of cleanup efforts. Exxon Corp. President Lee R. Raymond last week promised to spend whatever is “reasonably” needed to make the state whole again, but for the most part Alaskans themselves believe their ruggedly beautiful state will never be the same.

Cleanup aside, they continue to deal with the social and political fallout from the spill, from the disruption of Native American villages that subsisted for centuries on fishing to fundamental reforms in the way tankers are run and regulated.

And as far as the environment is concerned, they have to see if they can agree on what to settle for.

“There are still all of these tough questions: How clean is clean?” said Jim Butler, special assistant to the Kenai Peninsula Borough mayor. “Things will never be as clean as they were, so we have to decide how clean we can make them.”

Such decisions are made more difficult by a tense, adversarial atmosphere. Hundreds of lawsuits, led by state and federal criminal complaints against Exxon, have prompted lawyers to gag scientists. Data on wildlife damage and lingering environmental woes are made public only if lawyers decide they do not hinder potential legal strategies.

On the most controversial issues, such as the observed impact on bald eagle nesting or the recovery rate of intertidal organisms, little detailed information is made public.

When research is released, it often is treated cynically, even when all parties agree. Assurances from state, federal and Exxon scientists of the safety of eating locally caught fish, for example, was met with skepticism in native villages that have no choice but to eat what they catch in the waters at their door.

“They’ve been burned,” Butler said with resignation. “If you tell them an area has been cleaned, they just don’t believe it.”

The secrecy and information control has soured some of the goodwill Exxon has engendered with its lavish cleanup effort, which pumped an estimated $53-million worth of purchases and salaries into Valdez alone--an isolated port town with only 3,500 residents on the day before the spill.

So, too, do the complicated formulas Exxon is using to compensate fishermen who were hurt when the spill forced the state to shut down lucrative salmon and other fishing seasons from Cordova to Kodiak, 350 miles to the west.

“Exxon keeps playing the float game with us,” said Chip Treinen, a Kodiak fisherman. “They keep saying, any week now, any week now, we’ll pay. I’ve been hearing that since last July.”

Such delays are due in part to the difficulty inherent in applying strict mathematical formulas to the vagaries of the seas. Exxon wants to base its compensation on past catches; fishermen prefer calculating an average share of available catch, a formula that might double payments.

Charles Meacham of the state Fish and Game Department said that even with a spill-interrupted salmon season last year, fishermen hauled in 23.8 million salmon from Prince William Sound. That is more than the 10-year average of 20 million, he said, but less than half of the 48 million fish state officials expected.

The oil may have played some part in the disappointing catch, he said, but nobody knows how much--or at least no one will say until hundreds of lawsuits filed by fishermen against Exxon are heard in court.

“It’s all extremely frustrating for us,” Treinen said.

Still, there is evidence that the worst may be over for fishermen. Tests show that fin fish show no sign of oil contamination at all, and only a small number of shellfish have been found to be contaminated.

Otters, meanwhile, have returned in large numbers off the fishing town of Cordova, and bald eagles still can be seen in numbers on the uninhabited islands that dot the sound. Porpoises playfully swim alongside fishing boats as they plow through the notoriously rough winter seas in the area.

But conservationists and others fear lasting effects.

“It’s obvious to us that the full extent of the damage will not be known for several years,” said Eric Jorgensen, a lawyer for the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in Anchorage. “For example, the small (salmon) fry that left the area in the middle of the spill will not be back for several years. Until they come back, we won’t know how they are affected.

“The same is true with intertidal life, the starfish and all the other organisms that live on the shoreline. I think we’ll have to wait several years to see any chronic effects from living in areas with lingering pollution.”

It is unclear what effect the spill will have on the region’s bird population. More than 30,000 dead sea birds--mostly varieties of ducks and diving birds--were found last year, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has suggested that as many as 90,000 to 270,000 birds may actually have died, with the bulk swept out to sea or eaten by other animals. But it cautioned that “whether bird losses from the spill represent biologically significant losses in Alaska . . . remains to be seen.”

“The sound may be very resilient in some ways and not so in others,” said Greg Erickson, director of the Oil Spill Impact Assessment and Restoration Division of the state Department of Fish and Game. “We need more science to know which is which. I don’t, however, think we’re ever going to take the sound back to the way that it was before the spill. Nature is not like a movie projector you can just run backwards.”

Exxon President Reynolds concedes that scientists may be able to detect evidence of the spill even after his company finishes its cleanup. But he said tourists and other recreational users of the area should be challenged to detect evidence of the accident.

“I think in not too long a time . . . we will not be able to tell what happened,” he said after announcing Exxon’s plans to resume the cleanup effort that was suspended last Sept. 15 because of harsh winter weather in the Gulf of Alaska.

Otto Harrison, Exxon’s Alaska Operations Manager, said the oil giant hopes to resume cleanup work in May, after a detailed work plan is reviewed and approved by the U.S. Coast Guard.

That plan will be developed after 20 teams of five state, federal and Exxon scientists inspect shoreline identified last fall as still moderately to heavily oiled. The detailed shoreline assessment was conducted by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

Preliminary plans released last week by Exxon indicated that the oil company intends to abandon two controversial, labor-intensive cleanup processes used last summer--the hand-polishing of individual rocks and steam cleaning of whole beaches. Polishing was criticized as ineffective while steam cleaning was seen as too effective--it was blamed for sterilizing the beaches of valuable intertidal organisms while it cleaned oil from cobbles.

Harrison said Exxon will focus on “less intrusive” methods this year. One such method is to have small crews with pickaxes and shovels dig up tar mats--asphalt-like crusts of weather-dried oil. Another is to spray nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers on oiled beaches to promote the rapid growth of microorganisms that naturally break down oil.

“Exxon’s general portrayal of the way work will proceed--small groups working selected areas, an emphasis on techniques that minimize environmental disruption--are consistent with the state’s view of the season ahead,” said Dennis Kelso, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

How many of those small groups will be needed will not be known until after completion of the spring beach survey, which is scheduled to begin March 28.

In the meantime, state and federal lawmakers both are moving ahead with legislation to tighten up regulation of the oil industry and improve the state’s ability to respond to future spills.

Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper introduced four bills last month that would authorize the state to conduct its own inspections of tankers operating in state waters, let state inspectors examine the Alyeska pipeline terminal in Valdez without prior consent, impose stricter spill-response requirements on shippers and increase civil penalties for certain spills by 500%.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., the joint entity that operates the Trans Alaska Pipeline and the Valdez oil terminal, already has bolstered safety and spill response. Escort vessels packed with emergency spill-containment gear now accompany each tanker as they steam through the area, tankers that have not filed emergency plans are not permitted to dock, and a fully staffed skimmer-barge is on constant standby in a cove on Naked Island in the middle of the sound.

The Coast Guard, meanwhile, has modified its radar to improve coverage of Prince William Sound, and it has established a permanent new, round-the-clock position of watch supervisor to improve oversight of tanker traffic.

“We’re none of us any longer as naive as we were,” Chrystal said. “We will never again be as complacent as we were on March 23 last year.”

Change has also come to the people of Alaska, especially those in the fishing villages hit hardest by the oil spill.

In the months after the spill, a staff member for Cowper’s Oil Spill Coordinating Office recalled comforting a fisherman found sobbing in a Cordova street. Police in Valdez said their jail filled to overflowing with arrests, primarily of transient cleanup workers who killed some of their rare idle hours in one of the town’s five saloons before driving to the temporary camps that had mushroomed around town.

Such camps were essential during the height of the cleanup last summer, when an estimated 10,000 temporary residents briefly overwhelmed the town.

“It would be like dumping a million people into Los Angeles,” said Valdez Mayor Lynn Chrystal. “Crime skyrocketed, and we had problems with everything down to sewage treatment, as anybody who lives out near the sewage treatment plant can attest.”

Grants from Exxon ameliorated these problems and permanently expanded the city’s sewage plant. Exxon gave more than $9 million to local governments in the spill area to help them cope with the influx of workers.

Most of those transients were well-paid--Exxon paid $16.69 an hour in a jobs market where many people earned as little as one-fourth that rate or were unemployed. Meanwhile, state officials said people who normally would be hired by fishing boats or canneries could not work at all because many fisheries were canceled, often at the last minute.

These problems were reflected in a sharp increase in the demand for social services. The number of clients at the rural mental health clinics in Valdez and Homer doubled after the spill and increased by 50% in Kodiak. Alcohol and drug abuse tripled in Homer and rose by 28% in Cordova.

To the surprise of some social workers, life seemed to ease up over the winter and people started to regain their sense of humor. During the recent Valdez Winter Carnival, people flocked to a musical play, “Tanker on the Rocks,” that satirized all aspects of the accident, including Exxon, regulators and pipeline workers themselves.

“I think people are finally just now beginning to be able to laugh about it and have fun with it,” said Terry Wilson, a reporter at the weekly Valdez Vanguard newspaper. “Three months ago, I don’t think we could have (laughed).”