All That’s Left Is Spillover : The Oil Slick Is Gone and All Seems Serene in Alaska, but Controversy Bubbles Underneath

There is no sign of oil floating anywhere, but beneath the surface Alaska is ill at ease.

Up here on the western side of the Gulf of Alaska, into one of the greatest densities of sea life in the world, is where the oil came. Winter froze the tar balls, many of which were ground into sand by storms. It’s business as usual again at the Afognak Wilderness Lodge. The sportfishing has returned to normal--returned, according to one qualified assessment, from “the biggest boomer year in history.”

The year of the spill. The year of environmental outrage. The year Exxon paid the bill. The year Alaska cleaned up.

“What oil spill?” a visitor asks today, watching the sockeye (red) salmon mass so thick at the head of Paul’s Creek on Afognak (uh-FOG-nak) Island that they can still be snagged, legally, just by jerking a large treble hook through the water.

What oil spill? The camera wonders, framing the familiar and mighty pristine vistas.

Maybe one should ask the innocent bystanders, those pathetic, oil-drenched birds and sea otters that perished after the Exxon Valdez split itself open on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, and created an armchair sport: Exxon-bashing.

Or ask the Alaskans, a people divided by their conscience.

Oh, that oil spill. Almost 11 million gallons, it was the worst man-made environmental disaster in North American history.

The spill stretched 490 linear miles and slimed 700 to 800 miles of beaches. Beaches along the Kenai Peninsula may look OK on top, but setting foot on some today is like stepping onto an oil-soaked sponge.

In other cases, the resource and the people are recovering. Prospering, even.

“You can’t believe how fantastic the sportfishing was last year,” said Shannon Randall, who runs the Afognak lodge with her husband, Roy. “We’re used to seeing a lot of salmon up at the mouths of the creeks, but sometimes the mouths were backed up three-quarters of a mile, just choking with salmon, deep and wide. We’d grind them up in our propeller going upstream.”

Tom Merriman, a sporting goods dealer and borough assemblyman on Kodiak Island south of here, said: “We’re all concerned about long-range (effects), but last year was terrific, and we’ve had a tremendous run of (salmon) this year. Mother Nature has worked another of her phenomena.”

Mother Nature and Exxon, it seems. One reason the sportfishing was so good last year is that the state closed down the commercial fisheries, including the state’s largest at Kodiak, lest oil-tainted fish find their way into the world market and stain the industry’s image.

Image was a major problem for Exxon and Alaska. Elsewhere, the perception of the magnitude of the spill was that most of Alaska was wiped out. Sportfishing lodges remote from Prince William Sound experienced needless cancellations, and tourism was off about 50% for the year.

But who suffered? Not the commercial fishermen or the lodge operators, who were either hired by Exxon for the cleanup or were compensated for their losses, based on proof of average earnings in recent years.

Exxon has estimated the cleanup is costing it more than $2 billion, which some observers claim it covered by quickly raising prices at gas pumps in the Lower 48, along with other major oil companies.

Considering that 11 million gallons amount to less than three hours’ flow from the Alaska Pipeline, amateur economists in Alaska calculate that Exxon is making money on the spill.

But, while environmental emotion ran strong down south, Alaskans are ambivalent about the oil company. According to many people, Exxon went out of its way to see that nobody got hurt. For a while, the money flowed like oil.

“That’s a sore subject around here,” Kodiak cab driver Vicky Roberts said. “Without these (fishing) boats, we’re dead meat. People made a lot of money, bought cars and everything, and then winter came and the Exxon money stopped. A lot of the smaller boats lost everything.”

But others struck a bonanza. Roberts said: “The cab business was OK, when you had to run Exxon people around (for) $100 tips. It wasn’t their money . . . all on the expense account.”

Most of the fishing fleet, depending on boat size, was chartered by Exxon’s main cleanup subcontractor, Veco Inc. of Anchorage, for as much as $10,000 a day. One man who owned a landing craft was said to have netted $1 million. According to Alaska Business Monthly, Veco grossed almost $24 million in contract services.

“I know some people that were paid $600,000 not to fish last year,” Merriman said. “(The spill) made a lot of people a lot of money.”

The phenomenon coined a new word in the Alaskan vocabulary-- spillionaires.

There was a moral conflict between those who accepted Exxon’s largess and those who didn’t. “Sellout” was a common accusation. Apparently, long after nature has repaired the damage, there will still be human wounds to heal.

Merriman said that although he resisted the temptation to raise his prices and gouge Exxon employees when they came shopping for rubber boots and rain gear, his gross sales were up $250,000 for the year.

His son, Tom II, chartered his 43-foot sportfishing boat U-Rascal and “made 10 times what he would have normally made.”

Briefly, it was another boom for Alaska. After the 19th-Century gold rush, the king crab boom in the 1960s and the high-paying pipeline jobs in the ‘70s, here came cleanup fever as the ‘80s slipped into the ‘90s.

Merriman called it “a windfall” for Alaska.

But not everyone cashed in. The spill rendered a measure of moral justice when some fishermen who in previous years sold off some of their catch for cash off the dock couldn’t claim compensation on the basis of past income they’d never reported, without alerting the IRS.

Bill de Creeft operates Kachemak Air Service out of Homer. His wife, Barbara, who dispenses weather reports and other wisdom for bush pilots, has the most familiar voice in south-central Alaska. The De Creefts refused to bump their usual clientele of fishermen and tourists to fly cleanup officials for inflated fares.

De Creeft also declines to fly bear hunters for any price--apparently, a man of principle.

Others, such as Kevin Suydan and his wife, Wenona, who operate two fishing boats out of Kodiak, didn’t join in the cleanup, either.

“I put my name on the list, but I didn’t get involved in the politics of friends hiring friends,” Suydan said. “It caused a lot of hard feelings.

“Oh, yeah, we got compensated--about 80% of what we would have made (fishing).”

This month, Exxon sued a Ketchikan boat owner for $2.5 million, claiming he paid kickbacks to an Exxon employee to assign work that was never done.

Suydan bitterly called it all “a bogus cleanup--they weren’t doing anything.”

Scott Thompson, who has a marine service business in Kodiak, was hired to organize a cleanup crew and go to Katmai National Park on the Alaska Peninsula, where the National Park Service and the Department of Environmental Conservation wouldn’t let them onto the beach without the proper permits.

“We sat there for four days--at $65,000 a day,” Thompson said.

Bill Dennis, who works on fishing boats, said: “We’d go out and just sit there, with nothing go do, for weeks at a time. I was making $440 a day.”

But many workers were hired for standby and patrol duty, so they’d be ready wherever the slick decided to go. They weren’t supposed to do anything unless needed.

Laurence Livingston of Homer was earning $6 an hour at the Seward Fisheries cannery when the oil spilled. He got a cleanup job for $17 an hour and was among a crew of 40 sent to Gore Point at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula.

“We worked there two days,” Livingston said. “Then USA Today and CNN were brought in. After they left, all of us were laid off.”

Livingston’s next job was picking up “secondary impaction” tar balls--those washed in from other beaches--off the beaches of Kamishak Bay on the Alaska Peninsula. Then he went to Tonsina Bay, which was especially hard hit, and was handed a steam hose to blast over the oil-covered rocks.

“After a couple of days I figured out it was totally useless,” Livingston said. “We were just re-oiling the rocks . . . moving the oil around. The best method was manpower and a shovel and bucket.”

Nine days later, Livingston was transferred to the stark, uninhabited Barren Islands between the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island--a major sea lion rookery.

“They had piled up oil-slicked drift logs to burn, and I figured out what was going on,” Livingston said. “They were making us into guinea pigs.”

According to Livingston, the authorities wanted to test the toxic effects of such an operation. When asked if anyone wanted to quit, Livingston and several others shot up their hands. They were on the next helicopter out.

He said: “At first, you go through a stage of apathy because you’re making so much money. The second stage is, ‘this is such a big scam--do I want to be a part of it or not?’ The third stage is you’re just fed up with it.

“Some oil was cleaned up. But almost everything you heard bad about Exxon was true--and everything that they said was good was a flat lie.”

Kirk Johnson is an Anchorage dentist and outdoor enthusiast who flies his own plane. But after the spill, he wasn’t allowed to fly it lower than 3,000 feet over the area of Knight Island at the southwest corner of Prince William Sound on the upper Kenai--an area thoroughly slimed.

“All the places that were hardest hit (the federal authorities) didn’t allow journalists to see,” Johnson said. “They closed the air space.”

Johnson planned a canoe trip last summer in the area. Flying over now, it appears normal.

“But if you step on the beach, the oil oozes up around you,” Johnson said. “I don’t think we’ll see it (usable) again in our lifetimes.”

Others say it wasn’t all just a big PR operation by Exxon.

“No way,” Kodiak’s Thompson said. “There was one heck of a lot of work going on. It got to where some of the teams were competing against each other (to collect the most spillage).”

Today, flyover inspections reveal little or no evidence that there ever was a spill, but negotiations on mitigation continue at the political-corporate level. There is still a dispute among the state, the Coast Guard and Exxon about whether ongoing cleanup efforts are doing more harm than good to the environment. The state is still planning litigation.

“They want to keep this thing going,” Merriman said, “milk it as far as it will go. I don’t have any great love for Exxon, (but) Exxon dumped a tremendous amount of money into the Alaska economy. They made a terrible blunder--but it wasn’t only their blunder. The safety net that was supposed to be in place was allowed to go away.”

As the price of oil dropped, Thompson said, state regulations to guard against spills went slack.

“Exxon did as much as could be done for Alaskans--but it was Alaska’s oil spill,” he said. “The state got out of this clean.”

In one way, at least.

With so much money around, Merriman said, drug abuse on Kodiak increased. After the profiteering, some former friends aren’t friendly anymore.

“(After) all the pirating and profiteering,” Merriman said, “the part that burns me is that it hasn’t affected the fish at all.”

At Paul’s Creek, waiting until instinct tells them it’s their turn to go upstream, spawn and die, the sockeye leap and tail-walk and body-surf like children. Roy Randall says he isn’t sure why the salmon jump:

“I guess it’s because they’re happy to be home.”

Home seems the same. The spill occurred during their two-to-three-year spawning cycle at sea.

From Bligh Reef, the oil slick spread and drifted with prevailing currents southwest into the Gulf of Alaska and down the Kenai Peninsula, toward Afognak.

“It was headed right for us,” Shannon Randall said.

Situated only 250 miles from the spill, no other lodge in Alaska was as threatened. It lost $40,000 in bookings, not quite half of its business, although a drop of oil never touched the place.

For that, they thank Providence--and Exxon. The slick progressed about halfway down little Shuyak Island north of them when strong easterly winds arrived to push it westward through the uninhabited Barren Islands and into the Shelikof Strait.

Meanwhile, Exxon’s hired crews placed containment booms at all five entrances to the Randalls’ small bay within Seal Bay.

“They put put up booms before we even spoke to them,” Shannon Randall said. “We didn’t even know they knew we were here.

“A lot of trees were cut (to make booms). There were different kinds of boom material . . . pompons that would absorb oil, others that would repel oil, plastic curtains. Most of the creeks were barricaded five to seven layers deep with everything they could think of.”

She dreads to think what would have happened if the wind hadn’t changed, or if Exxon had done nothing.

“It would have been terrible,” she said. “It would have been a sloppy mess, and the salmon creeks would have been devastated.”

Despite losing the $40,000 in business, the Randalls more than made it up when Exxon also put them on the payroll.

“They hired us to watch and clean the booms,” Shannon Randall said. “For sure, because of the spill, there was no way you could lose money for ’89.”

This year, Exxon was still paying people $8 a pound for tar balls. Aerial inspections continued into summer.

“And Exxon paid for it all,” Shannon Randall said. “They’ve been wonderful.

“I had occasion to go into Kodiak once, and when I got off the float plane, I walked up the ramp. There was a demonstration against Exxon--televised. I felt so sick.

“A bunch of people were protesting, ‘Exxon, go home, you’re not doing enough.’ Just think, if one of your employees had done something, and you were trying to do everything you could possibly do (to fix it), and all these morons are verbally abusing you.

“I had been up to Exxon headquarters once, and there were all kinds of Exxon people flown in from wherever they could get ‘em, and they were getting bomb threats, everything.

“I felt so embarrassed at the low mentality of the local people--I mean, when they’re down, they’re kicking ‘em as well, when they’re trying go do their darndest. (Now) there’s nothing left to clean up. It’s all gone. Really, it’s all gone.”

But what of the future? Al Davis, a biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said damage “biologically, in the water column, (was) very little.”

The violent storms and deep tides in the Gulf of Alaska provide a strong flushing action. But Davis is concerned that the frozen tar balls might be time bombs, that when the outer crusts break, they might release toxic residue.

“And the other unknown is the sunken oil,” Davis said. “Some people feel that somewhere there’s this huge pool of oil sitting on the bottom.”

Mike McBride runs the Kachemak Bay Wilderness Lodge near Homer, bordering a wilderness preserve.

“The oil would have impacted coastal nesting birds, and there aren’t a lot of (those),” McBride said. “Nobody knows about the liver or kidney damage or the levels of heavy metals these birds may be carrying around in their guts as a result of feeding on mollusks and bivalves, which are filter feeders, so the long-term implications will probably take many years to see.”

Lately, Davis has been leading a study of clams along the Shelikof Strait, which caught the tail end of the slick. Clams have been switched with those from unaffected areas to measure any differences, but they won’t be checked until September.

Davis, who lives in Homer, was brought out of retirement soon after the spill “because they needed someone who knew where the salmon streams were.

“The only fault I saw is that they didn’t bring in the experts who knew how to put those (booms) out. The state was caught flat-footed.”

In Homer, Kodiak and Valdez, there were meetings around the clock after the spill, but for weeks there was little apparent progress in controlling the damage.

“Nobody was in charge,” Davis said. “They weren’t prepared. If it happened today, I don’t know if if would be any better.”