Ten years later, case is hardly closed
For many, optimism drowned in oil
By Patrick O'Driscoll, USA TODAY
CHENEGA BAY, Alaska - Sea otter moms and pups loll again in tidewater shallows. Bald eagles roost once more on coastal cliffs and spruce limbs. Ducks skitter across the blue-green water.
From a skiff cruising the rocky shoreline of Evans Island, Prince William Sound looks healed from the ravages of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. But across the sound, wounds still fester 10 years after the supertanker blundered onto Bligh Reef and poisoned a northern paradise.
The scientific debate continues over the environmental consequences of what happened just after midnight on Good Friday, March 24, 1989, when the grounded vessel leaked nearly 11 million gallons of North Slope crude.
But the disaster's effects on people are clear - and dramatically mixed. Some communities and individuals have flourished. Others still suffer. Some may wither away.
Alaska Native settlements, such as this tiny fishing village tucked in an island cove, struggle with damage to culture and loss of population because of the spill, losses that can't be measured or mitigated with money.
Before the accident, life in this settlement of 48 revolved around a culture of subsistence. Villagers fished, hunted and harvested the bounty of a landscape where their people have lived for thousands of years. But when the oil hit the bays and beaches of Prince William Sound, it disrupted the natural balance.
Now, villagers say, the kelp beds where they gathered herring eggs, a staple of their traditional diet, haven't recovered. Nor has the population of harbor seals, a major source of meat and hides. Shellfish, which accumulate toxic hydrocarbons from the spilled oil, remain suspect, even when scientists say many are safe to eat again.
Just as alarming to this village is the fact that Chenega Bay families are slowly dropping out of the community, lured away by jobs in the oil-terminal port of Valdez, 90 miles to the northeast.
Ironically, the jobs are with an oil industry team of rescuers and escort vessels created after the spill to prevent future catastrophes.
The lingering pain of the Exxon Valdez spill also reaches 85 miles east of here to Cordova, a picturesque coastal port where commercial fishermen are still reeling from the loss of income and markets after the oil wiped out fish eggs, polluted salmon streams and canceled fishing seasons. The value of commercial fishing permits, which once practically guaranteed a good life, college for the kids and a comfortable retirement, has plunged as much as 90%.
"Before the oil spill, people in this area really believed that they could support themselves and their families for the rest of their lives and pass their fishing operations on to their sons and daughters," says fisherman Steve Riedel, 42, who doubts he'll be able to do so for his daughter, now 16. "Their optimism has been destroyed."
Waiting on damages
Many of Cordova's 2,500 residents stew over Exxon's unwillingness to pay them $5.2 billion that fishermen, natives and others won in punitive damages in a 1994 federal court judgment. They say the money could help mend their frayed economy and salve scarred psyches. Exxon, which argues that those damages in the class-action civil case are wildly excessive, is in the fifth year of its appeal. Both sides await a hearing later this year before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In stark contrast to such wounded communities, the harbor towns of Valdez and Seward are now awash with new waves of tourism, from sea-kayakers and halibut fishers to RV campers and ocean-going cruise ships.
A tide of beneficial commerce related to the spill and its aftermath also continues to rise.
An around-the-clock safety network to avoid future spills is now based in Valdez. The Ship Escort/Response Vessel System, a multimillion-dollar assemblage of boats, equipment and people, has added 300 good-paying jobs in a city of 4,500 people.
Seward, ringed by snow-capped mountains and just a three-hour drive from Anchorage, boasts the new $56 million Alaska SeaLife Center, more than half of it paid for with money from Exxon's $1 billion settlement of federal and state claims over damage from the spill. On a point overlooking Resurrection Bay, the center is a showcase for the study of marine mammals, birds and fish, a rehabilitation center for injured wildlife, and a busy tourist attraction.
Such infusions of money and new jobs aren't always popular with Alaska Natives, who see some of the changes as costly to their cherished culture. Efforts to buy more coastal properties as permanent havens for wildlife threatened by the spill have upset some villagers because the lands being sold are theirs.
Using some of the Exxon settlement money, the state and federal governments' Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council has bought more than 635,000 acres of Alaska Native lands. The purchases enrich the tribal corporations that sell the properties. But the purchases have split some native communities because those holdings were originally acquired after long, hard battles for native rights.
"Ownership of land is power. This is the death knell of what we worked for," says Eyak corporation member Sylvia Lange, 46, of Cordova, whose people are selling 75,000 of their 148,000 acres.
Ten years later, the accident has left more than memories of 1,500 miles of blackened beaches, hundreds of thousands of dead birds and a slick that spread 500 miles beyond the sound.
"The spill is not something we talk about every day. But it's something we remember every year," says Ann Castelina, superintendent of Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, where the stress of the spill led to three divorces on her staff.
The accident is "something we've moved on from, a great learning experience for everyone," Castelina adds. "It's just unfortunate that learning could be so painful."
But across the water in Cordova, talk of the anniversary "has just ripped open this wound," says Patti Kallander, one of 10 local volunteers who help neighbors cope with lingering stress simply by listening. "It's more like a wake."
One fisherman told her that his old nightmares about the spill have returned, triggered by news reports last month about the freighter New Carissa, which ran aground and spilled oil off the coast of Coos Bay, Ore., 1,500 miles away.
"This guy had a dream that there was a tanker, broken in half and burning, out in the entrance to the sound," says Kallander, 41. "He actually got up and dressed to go help before he woke up."
It is hard to imagine such distress in this stunning landscape of glaciers, forested fjords, killer whales and postcard-pretty towns. But environmental sociologist J. Steven Picou of the University of South Alabama, who has studied Prince William Sound's residents extensively, says that in 1997, 40% of commercial fishermen in Cordova still had symptoms of severe depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Picou, who helped organize the volunteer listeners, says Cordova never got the benefits of what he calls a "therapeutic community," the phenomenon in which people pull together as they do in the wake of a hurricane, earthquake or other natural disaster. Because the Exxon catastrophe was man-made, townsfolk still struggle with anger and outrage, lack of trust, a sense of helplessness and conflicting accounts about how severe the impact of the spill was on the economy, people and wildlife.
Sound Alternatives, Cordova's mental health center, has had six directors and 15 different counselors on its 3-person staff since the spill. "They all burned out with heavy case loads," Picou says.
Atop all that, the polluting of a world-class salmon fishery re arranged markets and demand for the sound's catch. "People didn't want to buy salmon out of an oiled fishery," says Minneapolis lawyer Brian O'Neill, lead lawyer in the class-action case against Exxon. "These guys just lost shelf space permanently." Despite gradual recovery of local fishery stocks, salmon from the sound is still tainted by the bad publicity, if not by the oil.
Phil Lian, 59, a third-generation Alaskan, lost his fishing net supply business, then his marriage, in Cordova's economic and social upheaval. Lian, who also was a fisherman, is one of more than 30,000 residents of the sound who might claim a share of the $5.2 billion court judgment against Exxon. Unless the oil company pays up, "I'm retiring on welfare," he says.
Although efforts are under way to diversify the town's economy, "we're all walking wounded," says bookstore owner Kelley Weaverling, 52, who was Cordova's mayor in 1991-93. "The social fabric of this community was just pulled and stretched and torn."
His predecessor as mayor committed suicide, in part because of the spill. "He had his ashes spread on Bligh Reef," Weaverling says quietly .
Today, tour boats from Valdez visit the reef on their sightseeing rounds of Columbia Glacier and other natural wonders.
"There isn't a trip that somebody doesn't ask about the oil spill," says Valdez boat operator Stan Stephens, 64, a member of a regional committee of citizens that has closely monitored the oil industry's plans for preventing spills since the accident. "People aren't stupid. Most have read enough to know the sound is still damaged."
On each trip, Stephens says, "we talk about what happened, and what's good now. There's no sense looking backward. You go forward."
Booms and busts
That has long been the attitude in Valdez, which was the jumping-off point for prospectors during the Klondike gold rush and is used to booms and busts. Since the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed in 1977, oil dollars have flowed. Both Valdez and Seward, a town of 2,600 on the southwest fringe of the sound, took the brunt of the cleanup mayhem when, almost overnight, 11,000 workers poured in for jobs that paid a minimum of $16.69 an hour just to wipe oil off rocks.
Many blew their earnings. A few saved to become "spillionaires," local slang for those who cashed in and prospered, though none actually made a million.
"It changed our lives," says Laura Saxe, 35, who with her husband bought a Valdez RV park with their earnings. When they added a gas station, they named it Capt'n Joe's after the Exxon Valdez captain, Joseph Hazelwood. "He helped us out," jokes Jeff Saxe, 38.
The captain's memory provokes only bitterness in the native village of Tatitlek, population 97, just 3 miles northeast of the reef where the tanker ran aground.
A tower with a blinking beacon anchored there to warn ships away is called "Hazelwood's Stick" by villagers.
Although the oil never blackened Tatitlek's shore, it damaged the community's livelihood.
"We're having to travel farther and hunt harder for seal," says village council president Gary Kompkoff, 44, echoing a common complaint of Alaska Natives in villages across the sound. The spill killed an estimated 300 of the sound's 2,200 seals, and the species has continued to decline since then.
And because spilled oil still lingers in waters that support numerous other native foods, "It's always in the back of everybody's mind: What is safe?" Kompkoff asks.
Natives don't follow a subsistence diet and culture because they have to, he says. "It's because we prefer it. It's pretty hard to replace munyuk seal with canned Spam."
The choice between seal meat roasted over an open fire or "town food" is no contest for Tatitlek's 11 secondary-school students. Only the son of the village's non-native schoolteacher favors cheeseburgers.
"What seal is to us is like what New York steaks are to you. And I'd much rather have deer steak than dead cow," says Tonya Totemoff, 14. "It's our food they're dealing with, our life, our culture," adds Tonya's cousin, Angela Totemoff, 17.
Here in Chenega Bay, village council president Gail Evanoff worries that such a cultural connection might be lost to a generation that rarely gets to hunt seal and can't gather traditional foods as before.
"Our diet consisted of what the waters provided," says Evanoff, 49. "My husband, Larry, always says, 'When the tide goes out, the table is set.' "
On a short boat ride out of the village's sheltered bay, she and Pete Kompkoff, 56, Chenega Bay's keeper of traditional knowledge, land their skiff near Bishop Rock on a beach that was officially declared cleaned up years ago.
"It smells just like it spilled yesterday," says Evanoff, using a kitchen spoon to scrape black sludge from beneath a rock. She tars her hands filling a Ziploc bag with the thick gunk to show off at a 10th anniversary symposium in Anchorage.
"On a good, hot, sunny day, it just oozes out like a bad sore, which it is," she adds. "It's like living in a septic tank. What can live in this stuff, I ask you?"
Kompkoff, (no relation to Tatitlek's council president), points out a clutch of blue mussels on a tide-pool rock. "We ate those like crazy years ago, but not anymore," he says.
Back in the village council office hangs a 10-year-old conversation piece: Exxon's company wall calendar for 1989, permanently open to March. That month's color photo was of the Exxon Valdez itself, accompanied by this corporate safety slogan: "Take Time to be Careful Now."
'We will deal with it'
Five Chenega Bay families have relocated to Valdez to take jobs with the spill-response organization. Others might follow. That could mean the village school would drop below the 10-student minimum needed to stay open.
"It's one of those unintended consequences of some improvements," says John Christensen, 48, the village administrator.
"We have had many, many occurrences where the village has had to go on. History is history. You can't change it. We will deal with it."
Doing so successfully would mean Chenega Bay's second resurrection from suffering inflicted on a Good Friday.
On the same religious day, but 25 years before the oil spill, the great Alaska earthquake of 1964 sent a pair of 80-foot tsunamis crashing down on Chenega Island, where the community's original village stood 25 miles north of here.
The tidal waves killed 23 villagers and leveled everything but the schoolhouse. For 18 years, the survivors lived in limbo, scattered across the sound, until the village of today was rebuilt in 1982.
"In 1964, it was people we lost. In 1989, it was the waters and land and the environment," Evanoff says. "If we don't do something quick about re-establishing our tribal link to the land, it'll be like that Chenega limbo again."
© Copyright 1999 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
Reprinted here with permission.
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