What Price Pollution? Oil Spill Economics of Exxon Valdez Trial : Environment: Alaskans measure losses in diverse ways--missing ducks, dead seals, worm-infested salmon, a way of life.

For Eddie Lavshakoff, it’s the bleak silence of a bay once clamoring with ducks. For John Totemoff, it’s the empty ledge where he used to hunt seals. For Gail Evanoff, it’s the ominous oddities--herring with lesions, a worm-infested salmon--that make her suspicious of the waters she once trusted to sustain her.

The residents of this Aleut village say they don’t need scientific studies or economic models to know that Prince William Sound still suffers from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

They keep their own watch, and for them the greatest losses are impossible to measure.

“Everything’s just wrong since the oil spill,” villager Mary Kompkoff said. “I was brought up eating food off the land and water, and we never thought twice about things when we ate them. Now, I’m thinking.”

Chenega Bay’s 70 residents are among 14,000 Alaska Natives, commercial fishermen and others suing Exxon Corp. for up to $16.5 billion in the wake of the Exxon Valdez.

It’s been five years since the biggest oil spill in U.S. history smeared 11 million gallons of North Slope crude across Alaska’s wild southern coast. Now, the biggest environmental lawsuit in U.S. history is taking stock of the disaster’s economic and ecological impacts.

The trial is in its third month and far from done. But already it is clear to Chenega Bay residents that some costs can never be tallied.

“This is our lifestyle, our culture,” John Totemoff said, standing on his small fishing boat, just in from an early morning trip that netted 16 salmon for his family’s use next winter. “How could I put a price tag on this?”

He’s not the first to ask. Lawsuits started piling up against Exxon just four days after the Exxon Valdez tanker struck Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989.

Two weeks later, Exxon took out full-page newspaper ads, promising to “meet our obligations to all those who have suffered damage from the spill.”

That broad promise soon required qualification. As the oil spread, ultimately fouling 1,500 miles of coastline, the spill’s economic repercussions reached even farther across Alaska.

There were some winners, such as the fishermen “spillionaires” who chartered out their boats to Exxon during the $2-billion cleanup.

But there also were many victims--from the coastal fishermen who claimed they were ruined by lost fishing seasons, to the homesteader far inland who grumbled that his moose-hunting suffered because of cleanup-related traffic on the Glenn Highway.

The homesteader was among the few who didn’t sue Exxon. By last winter, the roster of plaintiffs included tour-boat operators and fishing guides, sea-otter researchers whose oiled subjects had died by the thousands, and thousands of net menders, boat builders, cannery workers and seafood wholesalers dependent on the fishing fleet.

Many plaintiffs were dismissed in March, when U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland in Anchorage ruled that onshore businesses had no legal claims if they hadn’t suffered direct physical damage from the oil.

“There is no question but that the Exxon Valdez grounding impacted, in one fashion or another, far more people than will ever recover anything in these proceedings,” Holland wrote.

The claims remaining are complex enough. Attorneys for 10,000 commercial fishermen and 4,000 Alaska Natives have been arguing their case before a federal jury in Anchorage since May 9, seeking more than $1 billion in actual damages and up to $15 billion in punitive damages from Exxon and tanker Capt. Joseph Hazelwood.

A few blocks away in a state courtroom, attorneys for six coastal towns and six Alaska Native corporations are seeking $100 million in a trial that began July 5.

Exxon lost the first phase of the federal trial in June, when jurors decided that recklessness on the part of Exxon and Hazelwood led to the spill. The plaintiffs had argued that Hazelwood was drunk the night of the spill and that Exxon had known about his drinking for years.

Next, the jury considered claims by commercial fishermen that not only did the spill ruin salmon and herring harvests by disrupting Prince William Sound’s ecological balance, it depressed prices for fish caught by tainting the reputation of Alaska salmon.

Exxon argued that the ecological damage was not as severe as the plaintiffs claimed, and that world market conditions and competition from farmed salmon were to blame for falling fish prices.

For three weeks, dueling scientists, economists and other expert witnesses debated the spill’s biological and economic fallout.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys drew upon state and federal studies to portray a marine environment torn apart by oil.

Government scientists estimate 300,000 to 645,000 birds were killed outright by the oil, and some devastated bird populations, including common murres and harlequin ducks, are failing to reproduce in areas that were oiled. Young sea otters are dying in unusual numbers in western Prince William Sound, possibly from feeding on mussel beds where oil remains trapped.

Most important to fishermen, runs of pink salmon returning to Prince William Sound have plummeted for the last two summers, after strong showings in 1990 and 1991. Likewise, springtime herring harvests, strong in 1991 and 1992, were cut short this year and last year when too few fish showed up. Many herring had organ damage and lesions.

But Exxon’s experts say blaming all the sound’s problems on a spill that happened five years ago is overly simplistic. Herring and salmon populations fluctuate naturally because of changes in ocean temperature and food supply, they say.

They also contend that Exxon’s cleanup efforts, combined with winter storms, have scoured nearly all the oil from Prince William Sound beaches. Even in 1989, one scientist testified, the dissolved oil in most areas did not reach levels toxic to fish.

In the stale air of the windowless courtroom, attorneys have struggled to keep the working-class jury’s attention.

“Let me bring up another chart that will help explain this,” an Exxon lawyer said during one tedious session on fish forecasting. Two jurors traded tight smiles. Another tilted her head back and yawned. The judge rubbed his eyes. It was 9:30 a.m.

The jury started deliberating the fishermen’s claims July 12 with a verdict form that looked like a Chinese menu. Year by year, species by species, area by area, they had to decide whether the oil spill caused poor fish runs or reduced the prices paid to fishermen. Then, they had to calculate a dollar amount for damages.

The fishermen sought $895 million in compensation. Exxon suggested about $100 million.

For all the imponderables involved, the commercial fishermen’s claims at least dealt with a market commodity. The trial’s next phase, dealing with claims by Alaska Natives that the oil spill kept them from their subsistence hunting and fishing, plunges the jury into more nebulous territory.

Natives do not sell the wild foods they harvest, so how does one calculate their value? What price the loss of seagull eggs or seal livers, of herring roe on kelp?

Judge Holland ruled the Natives could not sue for losses to their cultural heritage. He limited their damage claims to the economic value of their lost harvests, using equivalent store-bought foods as a guide. He did not mention what those equivalents might be.

Soon, the jury will face the greatest imponderable yet: How do you punish, if you punish at all, one of the world’s largest corporations, a company with sales of $111 billion and profits of $5.3 billion last year?

Exxon points to its efforts after the spill--the $2 billion it spent on cleanup, the $900-million settlement it reached with state and federal agencies to compensate for damage to natural resources, the $300 million in damages it paid voluntarily to fishermen and others.

“We don’t need any punishment,” said Exxon attorney James Neal. “I think we’ve been punished enough.”

In Chenega Bay, Mary Kompkoff had another view.

“No money in the world will change what Exxon did to us,” she said. “No money in the world will ever make it the same.”