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Oil company has recovered but Alaskans feel lingering effects
Friday, March 19, 1999
By JOEL CONNELLY
CORDOVA, Alaska -- This fishing village was full of life and promise 10 years ago, just before the oil tanker Exxon Valdez went aground on Bligh Reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound.
Robby Maxwell was finishing a winterÕs work assembling 60 fishing nets that would sell for as much as $30,000 apiece. Bill Webber and his 10 employees had spent a busy off-season building a half-dozen fishing boats.
A harbor filled with fishing boats buzzed with talk of the April herring season. The pink salmon were expected in unsurpassed numbers; their return would follow record-high salmon prices the year before.
ÒThe herring fishery was a bellwether: If I had a good season, my bills were paid for the year,ÕÕ said Phil Lian. Ten years ago, Lian owned a net-supply company, a bar and restaurant, a high-tech seine fishing boat, a time-share condo in Hawaii, plus four coveted permits to fish for herring and salmon in Prince William Sound.
Then disaster struck AlaskaÕs south-central coast.
A DECADE AFTER the March 24, 1989, oil spill, the largest in U.S. history, Prince William Sound appears serene and undisturbed, a sublime sanctuary. Sea otters frolic.
Bald eagles present an all-seeing presence atop tree snags. Seals and their pups lounge on icebergs calved by tidewater glaciers.
ÒEven in the worst-case places, the oil is rapidly going away and is not threatening anything,ÕÕ Dr. David Page, a Bowdoin College scientist hired by Exxon Corp. to conduct studies, told the recent 1999 International Oil Spill Conference in Seattle.
But Cordova, the human epicenter of the spill, still wears the scars of the spill.
``Look what you did!ÕÕ is written on a childÕs drawing of a tanker dripping oil, pasted in a downtown window.
Fishermen and townsfolk, many of whom cashed in on an overnight bonanza in trying to contain the oil spill, are paying the price of declining fish harvests. Native Alaskans have seen their subsistence lifestyle ebb with the declining herring runs and have been pushed awkwardly into a cash economy.
Plaintiffs who won $5 billion from Exxon are waiting for their first payments while the jury award sits in the bank, drawing interest for Exxon.
Capt. Joseph Hazelwood, the tankerÕs skipper who was convicted of negligently discharging oil, will be picking up trash on Alaska state lands this summer as part of his sentence.
Exxon has recovered, making billions of dollars in profits and planning a merger with Mobil Oil. The merger would create, in total assets, the largest corporation on earth.
Today, Exxon stresses the lessons learned: how to clean up an oil spill, and how to ship oil more safely.
``We all realize that oil spillage has dropped substantially in the last 10 years,ÕÕ said Al Maki, an environmental adviser to Exxon USA. He acknowledged at an oil spill forum earlier this month, however, that ``in spite of manÕs best efforts, accidents will happen.ÕÕ
Despite the companyÕs claims of nearly complete recovery, a childÕs sandbox trowel will uncover oil-soaked sand at Sleepy Bay on Latouche Island or at several places on Knight Island, across Prince William Sound from here.
``There is damage here that is irreparable. Period. No matter how many pictures you see of Prince William Sound in all its beauty, itÕs not the same beneath the surface,ÕÕ said Jack Reilly, a Cordova fisherman who holds down three jobs to make ends meet.
In 1989, Mark King owned one of four Cordova fishing boats that tried to keep a boom around the grounded Exxon Valdez as an Easter Sunday storm caused the oil to escape and spread.
King, whose family has pulled a livelihood from the sea for 62 years, signed cleanup contract No. 001 with Exxon and was later paid what he calls ``a phenomenal amount of moneyÕÕ to work on the cleanup.
In a state that has seen the fur trade, gold rushes and oil booms, Cordova saw a lot of money coming in during that summer 10 years ago. Contractors, fishermen, merchants, innkeepers, residents and outsiders cashed in on an oil spill recovery effort that ultimately cost Exxon more than $2 billion.
The overnight bonanza spawned acid news reports about the ``spillionairesÕÕ of Cordova. But it was short-lived.
Many fishermen, flush with cash, bought new boats and equipment, and found themselves badly overextended as fish runs failed and fish prices plummeted. Merchants had a bonanza year during the Ô89 cleanup ``but it was the last good year,ÕÕ said Marv Vandenbroek at the local hardware store.
Lian now estimates his assets _ if he could liquidate them _ at perhaps one-tenth of his $3 million net worth in 1989. Gone are the restaurant and bar, the net supply store, the Hawaii condo and the purse seiner.
Webber Marine & Manufacturing Inc. has built just six boats in the past 10 years. At Redden Nets, Maxwell has made only eight nets this past winter.
``I havenÕt been able to put one dollar into an IRA for my retirement, not one dollar into a fund for my childrenÕs education,ÕÕ Maxwell said. ``It scares the hell out of me.ÕÕ
``We lost more than half our processing capacity, and never regained it,ÕÕ said Linden OÕToole, who with her husband paid $300,000 for a seine-fishing permit before the spill. The couple later sold it for $48,000. The once-coveted permit, they say, is now worth perhaps $25,000 if a buyer could be found for it.
THE PINK SALMON fishery in Prince William Sound collapsed in 1992 and 1993, possibly because exposure to oil damaged reproduction. Hatchery-spawned pinks have since come back, but wild salmon are recovering more slowly.
``It is too soon to say we are totally out of the woods,ÕÕ said Ken Roemhildt, superintendent of North Pacific ProcessorsÕ cannery in Cordova.
But once-reliable markets have been lost to farmed salmon, and canneries have closed. Salmon prices went as high as $2.70 a pound during the late 1980s, but have fallen to one-fourth that level.
``You can catch fish, but you canÕt sell the fish,ÕÕ said Ross Mullins, a veteran Cordova fisherman.
The Pacific herring fishery also fell in 1994. The decline may be caused by disease, or possibly by lingering effects from the spill. Herring recently were classified as a ``recoveringÕÕ species by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the state-federal body monitoring sea life in the Sound. But last yearÕs run is a fraction what it was a decade ago.
``IÕve fished for herring once since 1993,ÕÕ said Mark King.
A fishermanÕs retirement fund usually comes from the sale of his or her assets. In Cordova, however, the price of seine boats and permits has fallen with the fishery. King sold his seiner last winter, receiving $70,000 for a boat he had bought for $175,000.
``These people went from being vibrant small-businessmen to depressed small-businessmen,ÕÕ said Brian OÕNeill, a Minneapolis-based attorney who represented 40,000 commercial fishermen and other parties in a class-action suit against Exxon.
In 1994, an Anchorage jury found Exxon had acted recklessly and awarded damages of $5 billion, most of it to commercial and native Alaskan fishermen, in the second-largest jury verdict in American history.
The plaintiffs have yet to see a penny of the money. Exxon has filed a multiplicity of appeals over the past five years. The case is to be heard by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this spring.
In appealing the jury award, Exxon was ordered to post a bank letter of credit assuring it could pay out the $5 billion. Interest of 5.9 percent is accruing on the award. Plaintiffs and their attorneys say the oil company can realize more than twice as much interest by investing the money and believe Exxon is using the delay to pay itself off.
Meanwhile, OÕNeill has watched his clients move away, go bankrupt, endure divorces and die.
``I thought they were going to make us whole, not put us in a hole,ÕÕ said OÕToole, the seiner.
CORDOVA HAS ENDURED more ups and downs than most communities of 2,500 residents.
A big part of the downtown business district burned to the ground in 1963. A year later, the massive Good Friday earthquake wiped out nearby shellfish beds. Enormous storms tearing in from the Gulf of Alaska have killed fishermen in treacherous waters of the Copper River Delta, about 30 miles east of here.
When natural disasters have struck, said former Cordova Mayor Margy Johnson, the community has bonded, wrapping itself in a we-shall-overcome attitude, and quickly gotten back on its feet.
``Nobody ever sued God,ÕÕ said Johnson.
The man-made disaster of the Exxon Valdez spill is another matter.
Its effects have unfolded year after year. And the marathon legal battle against Exxon has, in JohnsonÕs words, ``exhaustedÕÕ Cordova.
``The key point is that after the fire and earthquake, we could go out and make a living. The Sound was still whole,ÕÕ said Roxy Estes, a lifelong Cordovan.
Cordovans are bitter over what they say are broken promises from Exxon.
At the office of Cordova District Fishermen United _ a fisheries lobby group that fought construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline in the 1970s, fearing an oil spill in the Sound _ a quartet of veteran fishermen put up a banner during a snowstorm early this month. It read:
``Exxon 10 Years Later
No Payment
No Punishment
No Prevention.ÕÕ
``Everyone thinks weÕre going to get rich (from the Exxon lawsuit), but a lot of people will divide that money,ÕÕ said Virgil Carroll, a Wyoming native who came up to Alaska to serve in the Coast Guard, and stayed to fish out of Cordova for 32 years.
Carroll reared three sons in Cordova. All of them once fished. In recent years, as the fishery declined, they have moved to the lower 48 to pursue graduate degrees and livelihoods that donÕt depend on the sea.
A total of 52 other spills around the world have released far more oil than the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. The tanker Aegean Sea spilled 23.8 million gallons off the coast of Spain in 1992; a year later, the tanker Maersk Navigator spilled 78 million gallons off Indonesia; and the Brer sent 26 million gallons into waters off the Shetland Islands on the north coast of Scotland.
``But, hitting where it did, this is the most damaging oil spill in history in terms of biological, social and environmental damage. . . . It did extraordinary damage, long-lasting damage that has persisted 10 years later,ÕÕ said Rick Steiner of the University of AlaskaÕs marine advisory program.
THE EXXON VALDEZ went aground in a 30-by-75 mile bay in which a salmon fishery _ decimated in the 1950s by overfishing _ had been restored through conservation and hatchery construction to produce millions of fish.
And the oil was loosed upon a stormy coastline where containment was impossible even if the Alyeska Pipeline Co. had been able to get cleanup equipment quickly onto the spill.
The spill spread out of Prince William Sound down a 470-mile-long southwesterly trajectory, oiling a thousand miles of inlets, islets and outcroppings on the Kenai Peninsula and Kodiak Island, and extending down the Alaska Peninsula to such sanctuaries as Katmai National Park.
The death toll from the spill has been estimated by the trustee council at more than 260,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales. Billions of salmon and herring larvae may also have been casualties of the spill.
In October, a scientific paper from the National Marine Fisheries ServiceÕs Auke Bay Laboratory in Juneau was presented at an American Fisheries Society conference. The research found that very low-level contamination by oil affected salmon embryos and cut the return rate of adults to their spawning site.
``It means oil is toxic at much lower levels than previously thought, and that problems with fish are intergenerational,ÕÕ said Dr. Riki Ott, a Cordova-based marine biologist, gillnetter and former executive director of the Copper River Watershed Project.
THE OIL SPILL was toxic in other ways. The decline in the herring fishery has hit native Alaskan villages along Prince William Sound particularly hard. Herring roe is a major part of the native subsistence diet.
``The Sound was our supermarket,ÕÕ said Patience Anderson Faulkner, an ebullient woman who works at the Eyak tribal village and is a member of a regional citizen advisory committee created by Congress as a watchdog on oil tanker operations.
Faulkner jokes that she had to ``learn to be an Alaska native the last 22 yearsÕÕ after spending much of her earlier life as a military wife in the lower 48. The best parts of the learning were traditional foods such as herring roe and kelp.
``The last batch I received about four years ago from a cousin in Tatitlek,ÕÕ she said. ``It looked good. It came from an area that the scientists said had been cleaned up of oil. It sure didnÕt taste good.ÕÕ
The native village of Chenega, once destroyed by the 1964 earthquake, lay in the path of the spill. The Exxon Valdez disaster has cost Chenega two-thirds of its people. Oiled waters poisoned clam beds and no longer yielded a bounty of food. Much of ChenegaÕs native-owned land was bought by the trustee council.
It was isolated, ``but there was a lot of food,ÕÕ said Avis Kompkoff, who grew up in the village. ``Now you have to go far away to find it.ÕÕ
As they gathered for morning coffee at the net shop last week, Cordova fishermen remembered the night of March 28, 1989, four days after the tanker hit Bligh Reef. They heard Exxon executive Don Cornett deliver sweeping reassurances and expansive promises.
``We do business straight,ÕÕ Cornett told them. ``If you can show that you have a loss as a result of this spill, we will compensate it. . . . We will consider whatever it takes to make you whole.ÕÕ
The Exxon executiveÕs words are angrily quoted a decade later by people whose lives have been fractured.
``He lied to us!ÕÕ said Robby Maxwell.
A more reflective Bill Webber added: ``Society should demand accountability. And that is all we are asking for. They have the money to play games with us. At long last, after 10 years, they should at least pay for what they did to us.ÕÕ
P-I reporter Joel Connelly
can be reached at 206-448-8160
or joelconnelly@seattle-pi.com
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