Exxon Valdez, 18 Years Later

Bill Black has fished for salmon in the Prince William Sound area of Alaska since 1971 and makes his winter home with his two daughters in Bellingham.

Indelibly inked and etched into both our collective and individual memories are a certain few events. The evidence is that these memories will remain imprinted for the balance of our lifespans. For example, ask any “baby boomer” (or older) where they physically were when they first heard that President Kennedy had been shot and they can tell you.

Similarly, the residents and fishing women and men of Prince William Sound, Alaska, remember where they were when they first heard that a fully loaded supertanker had run up on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound.

It is, perhaps, a human capability gained through the eons that enables us to differentiate accurately and immediately between the superfluous and the profound. Shortly after midnight on March 24, 2007, will mark the 18th anniversary of the infamous grounding and subsequent spill of Alaskan crude oil from the Exxon Valdez. The damage, on many levels, continues.

Whatcom County, due to its relative close proximity to Alaska and its commercial fishing heritage, is the winter home to many fishing people who were and continue to be affected by that spill. While the physical damages (such as the absence of harvestable numbers of herring in what was once an overflowing cornucopia) to Prince William Sound continue, to a very pronounced degree the demonstrated injury has been to our American judicial system, which has been intimidated by Exxon’s power.

The demonstration of power to slow the progress of justice as exemplified in the Exxon Valdez civil suit has implications for all Americans.

I was driving my truck on the Mount Baker Highway through Deming into Bellingham to work on my boat, the Monde Uni, when I first heard the news on a Canadian radio station that sunny and bright morning of March 24, 1989, that a tanker named the Exxon Valdez had run aground in Prince William Sound after having left the terminus of the Trans Alaska Pipeline at one of the few ports in the sound, Valdez.

I was engaged in an expensive and consuming upgrade on the machinery of the Monde. I’d run the boat south to Bellingham from Cordova, Alaska, the previous autumn with a plan to make my combination seiner, gillnetter and longline vessel more efficient. It’s a long way between Cordova and Bellingham, particularly in a relatively small boat such as the 42-foot Monde Uni.

The first hurdle upon leaving Cordova on the southward journey is the 350-mile wide crossing of the Gulf of Alaska in order to get tucked into the inside waters of Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, and, finally, Washington state. You’re almost guaranteed, particularly in the fall, to get seriously thrashed on the Gulf of Alaska crossing. The rest of the trip, while loaded with hazards, is less dicey and can even be relaxing.

The Monde Uni was hauled out of the water at the old Weldcraft boatyard in the Bellingham harbor where it sat through the extremely cold fall and early winter of 1988. As early as I could in 1989, I set to work on a daily basis on my project. For me, it was a labor of love. The Monde Uni was (and is still, I’m sure, but that’s another story) a beautiful boat, which deserved only the finest equipment and most painstaking workmanship.

Work was progressing and roughly on schedule for the trip north the anticipated big season of 1989, so when the Exxon Valdez ran aground I tried to stay focused on the work that needed to be done, hopeful that the oil spill wouldn’t be too bad. Days went by and my hopes were not being realized. On March 28 I flew to Cordova.

There was a big meeting at the high school my first night back in Cordova. A fisherman who had been out at the spill scene trying unsuccessfully to do some good with pathetically inadequate equipment told us of a crewman on the tanker Baton Rouge, which had been alongside the Exxon Valdez, yelling down at him that “You oughta get some of that Navy boom!”

This report prompted me to begin a series of phone calls over about a 10-day period with numerous very large maritime corporations and governmental agencies. They revealed that Exxon had clearly gone into a state of corporate paralysis, unwilling to cut the checks necessary to get these large and experienced companies with expertise in oil spill recovery moving.

The president of one very large tug and barge company told me of his frustration in Exxon’s seeming inability to recognize his company’s experience and capabilities, demonstrated many times previously, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico when offshore oil wells had “blown out.” They had been successful by anchoring barges downstream from spills and running oleophilic rope mops between the barges.

The Naval officer at the Pentagon who was in charge of the Navy’s oil spill supplies in Stockton, California, and Norfolk, Virginia, told me of his frustration that those vast supplies were not being loaded onto C-130s and flown to Valdez. The largest salvage vessel in North America, the Arctic Salvor, which was in Valdez by sheer coincidence, was not on charter even though its potential utility was unquestioned.

I could go on here with what I became privy to while I was in Cordova without my boat after the spill, but the evidence that Exxon was not doing everything it could to get the oil out of the water became overwhelming and clear. Exxon, in fact, seemed to not want to recover large quantities of the spilled oil. I’ve still got the notes I made in those frantic days. (Note: When those two Ninth Circuit Court judges recently halved the jury’s punitive damages because of Exxon’s “prompt actions to alleviate the damage post spill,” I just had to chuckle.)

Realizing I had to finish up the work on my boat, I returned to Bellingham and went back to work trying to keep “the blinders on” while not knowing — which has become a post-spill pattern — what the future would hold.

Very fortunately for the Copper River Delta and the fisheries that occur there, the principal ocean current on the Alaskan Pacific coast is from east to west, sparing the delta from any of the crude oil that leaked from the Exxon Valdez. The Cordova gillnet fleet, even in 1989, was able to fish as it always had for the sockeye and king salmon, which run up the Copper River.

I ended up arriving in Cordova and being ready to fish the Copper one week late, which became a case in point of “better late than never” because the fishing was good. The Prince William Sound seine and gillnet fisheries which come later, though, were highly restricted. I was not able to fish within 80 miles of where I was used to fishing so as to avoid any contact with the oil.

It needs to be said that there was never, as far as I know, any fishery product produced in Alaska with any degree of pollution from the spill. There are a few things that Alaska does right and one of them is the production of wholesome seafood. This has never been compromised through the years since the spill.

On only one occasion during that first post spill fishing season of 1989, when I took a group of bird observers out to an area that had been lightly oiled, did I even see any oil. After the fishing season was over, though, I made two lengthy trips out into the southwest sound to see for myself what the beaches in the oiled areas looked like.

Utter and absolute devastation is what I found. Picture yourself on a beach where for as far as you can see in either direction it is black with crude oil. My friends and I completely loaded my boat with oily garbage of various types stuffed into big plastic bags and finally went back to Cordova.

The following season, 1990, was the last time for several years when the pink salmon acted normally. The 1991 season was marked by very few early and middle season returning pink salmon, whereupon all the pinks came in one big mixed rush very late in the season. Unfortunately, most of the buyers had departed by that time.

In order to avoid the calamity of far too many dead fish piled up at the hatcheries, millions of fish were caught and loaded into large boats and dumped at sea. So, 1991 became known as the year of the “Humpy Dump” (pink salmon are nicknamed humpys).

The 1992 and 1993 years were very similar in that the water in Prince William Sound seemed to have died. The estuary that is the sound grew silent of life. The water, which is usually rich in plankton, became eerily crystal clear. There were almost no fish to catch. The nets came up empty of even jellyfish. No one could make their boat payments.

Totally frustrated, the seiners blockaded Valdez Narrows to tanker traffic. They got away with it for a number of reasons, number one being we were living under a different Administration. Clinton’s Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit met with the fishing fleet in Valdez the day after the blockade and was very supportive of our efforts.

All the participating fishing boats ultimately received letters from the Coast Guard warning that if they tried it (a blockade) again they’d be thrown in prison, their boats would be taken away and they’d all be fined $250,000. There will probably not be another blockade anytime soon.

The year of the civil trial in Anchorage was 1994. Fishing fleets and others including Native groups and municipalities sued Exxon for civil damages resulting from the spill. The trial judge, U.S. District Court Judge Russell Holland, presided over a jury which decided ultimately at the conclusion of a six-month trial to penalize Exxon $5 billion in punitive damages for what was determined to be “reckless” corporate behavior.

That jury’s decision has been held up for the last 13 years by a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Just a little over two months ago, on December 22, 2006, that panel finally reached a split decision. Two of the three judges joined to lower Exxon’s penalty to $2.5 billion while the third stated “ that by no principled means should the penalty be lowered.”

Exxon, of course, appealed even the halving of the original jury award to an “en banc” (larger) panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. We might know more regarding this appeal by the publication time of this article. Needless to say, Exxon will continue to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. Whether the “Supremes” will accept this case is questionable … the current conventional wisdom is that the Supreme Court will reject a hearing of this spill case.

The grounding of the Exxon Valdez and everything that resulted from that grounding has been horribly tragic. We, as a culture, knew as well in 1989 that drinking and driving could and would lead to injury and death. Exxon was reckless and needs to be taught a lesson. Exxon is attempting to, and maybe they’ve succeeded, in teaching us (the American public) a lesson. What might that lesson be?

The number one lesson learned by many in the Prince William Sound fishing fleet is that we, as stakeholders, need to play an active role in bolstering and encouraging regulatory agencies to do their jobs with vigor.

The RCAC, or the Regional Citizens Advisory Council, an independent organization consisting of representatives elected from communities potentially at risk from oil transport, has proven to be very effective at helping aid the safety of oil transport in Alaska. This organization should be modeled in Washington state. . §