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Twenty years ago today, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez departed from the Alaskan fishing port of Valdez. The ship’s captain, Joseph Hazlewood, was under the heavy influence of alcohol when the the Exxon Valdez hit a reef off the coastline of Prince William Sound. The resulting oil spill, one of the largest and most catastrophic in US history, dispersed over 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaskan waters, damaging up to 1,300 miles of the coastline. The March 24th, 1989 spill led to the Federal enactment of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill, despite billions of dollars spent on clean-up, at least 16,000 gallons of oil remain in Alaskan waters. In a 1991 settlement for state and federal claims, Exxon (now named Exxon Mobil), pleaded guilty and has paid billions of dollars in environmental damages. In 1994 22,000 native Alaskans affected by the spill brought a class action suit against Exxon and last June, the U.S. Supreme Court awarded them $507.5 million, the equivalent of only a tiny fraction of Exxon-Mobil’s annual profits.

GUEST: Jerry McCune, President of the Cordova District Fishermen United, Rick Steiner, Professor at the University of Alaska.

Rough Transcript:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Joining me on the line this morning are two guests from Alaska who have been very active on this issue: Jerry McCune is the President of the Cordova District Fishermen United, and Rick Steiner, a Professor at the University of Alaska. Can you briefly describe how that day unfolded, twenty years ago on the day it happened, and when it occurred to you the scale of this disaster?

Rick Steiner: Yeah, Jerry certainly knew as much about it as anyone. Yeah, it was horrible, we heard the news first thing, twenty years ago this morning, which was ironically twenty five years from the Good Friday earthquake in Alaska which also was epicentered in Prince Williams Sound, it was a stunning synchronicity there, but we heard that the tanker had run up hard of ground, had lost much of its oil, and that the oil was starting to spread out very slowly out onto the sound and after a big windstorm came up a couple of days later, a strong 70 to 80 mph northerly wind, the oil spread over far out of any control of any clean up equipment, which simply wasn’t there, and the rest as they say is history. It ended up over ten thousand square miles of Alaska’s coastal ocean, it ended up on twelve to thirteen hundred miles of some of the most pristine shoreline anywhere in the world, and the damage is still there today.

SK: Rick, many would say that the story of the Exxon-Valdez Oil spill is also the story of corporate invulnerability to any kind of serious prosecution. I mentioned the five hundred and seven million dollars awarded to the Alaskans who filed the lawsuit and that does sound like a lot of money, but when it’s spread out over the twenty two thousand people and when it’s compared to the profits of one of the largest corporations in the world if not the largest, it isn’t that much.

RK: No, it’s not. And Jerry would be a great one to address this. But the fishermen of Prince William Sound, let’s go back way in history to the early 1970s when the oil companies and the U.S. government wanted to get oil out of Northern Alaska to market and this big debate ensued as to how to get it there and it came down to two choices. Either build a pipeline across to Canada, which is where we think it should have been built, or build a shorter pipeline quicker to Prince Williams Sound, Alaska, and haul all the oil to the tankers. The fishermen of Prince William Sound sued to stop that route because they know boats and they know people make mistakes and boats break and things happen. So they knew that there was an eventuality of a catastrophic oil spill in Prince William Sound and if that were to happen, it would seriously disrupt their commercial livelihoods, and that’s exactly what happened, and here twenty years later, they are still in litigation with Exxon. Exxon still has not agreed to pay the interest on that very small damage settlement that they were awarded. I should point back that the original court punitive damages that was awarded to the fishermen and the Alaskan natives against Exxon was at five billion dollars and that was back in ’93 or ’94 and it kept getting out on appeal, whittled down to a tenth of that level. The entire intent of a punitive damage verdict is to punish the behavior and to deter both that company and other companies from conducting their business in a reckless manner. And one has to ask, since Exxon has kept an after tax profits, hundreds of billions of dollars since the oil spill occurred, that five hundred million, is that a substantial punishment in deterrence to them? And we think not.

SK: Jerry, let’s talk a little bit about the effects on the fishing industry. The salmon, I understand, has recovered to an extent. But the herring has not. Can you tell us how deeply the livelihood of fishermen have been effected over the last twenty years?

Jerry McCune: Well, one thing that really hurts is the herring. The herring is the first thing that we got to do back in March when people came to town and it created a lot of economy for the town, of course the fishery itself kept the cannery’s INAUDIBLE open and the cruiser working, we don’t have that anymore. We don’t even start now till May 15. So we knocked that whole economy out of there and it doesn’t look like it’s ever going to recover in my lifetime and it’s really hurt the communities around Prince William Sound. Especially Cordova, which did most of all the processing and ah, fishermen still, to this day, I very rarely give interviews and this is one of the rare times I do. People are still pretty upset about the whole thing. I mean a lot of people, minimally, took a lot of hits on this, not knowing what their livelihoods were going to be like in the future.

SK: When you go out into the waters, do you still visibly see the oil? I mean I understand there are still sixteen thousand gallons at least?

JM: It depends, I mean you still have to go certain places you can see the stain on some of the rocks where it’s still just all black. And there are some beaches that we call, they’re not high energy beaches where it gets a lot of waves, you can still go there and dig oil out of the soil. And there’s lots of places where the villages won’t go do subsistence, that actually live in the Sound year round, because the oil soiled those beaches. And then there’s the killer whale pod that’s dying off from the oil, not counting the herring.

SK: And that’s more recent, right?

JM: Right, and there’s not anything you can do about it. I mean the pod was effected by the oil spill and it’s slowly dying out because it doesn’t reproduce and there’s really nothing you can do and a lot of birds and stuff have not recovered and mammals. Which is probably going to take another twenty years until they, maybe forty, till they recover, we’ll see.

SK: Rick Steiner, one the things that some folk say is the only thing that has come out of this disaster is the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. What is your comment on this Act? Is it strong enough and has it in your mind perhaps prevented or lessened the impacts of other oil spills and perhaps future oil spills?

RS: Oh certainly. And one of the interesting, innately human qualities we have is being able to take a disaster and do some good out of it. And we were able to do several good things out of this tragedy. One was the Oil Pollution Act which really raised the bar on shipping safety standards throughout the United States. It mandated a twenty five year end phase in of new double halled tankers nation wide. Today we only have one singled halled tanker in the Trans Alaskan Pipeline Trade and that’s ironically the sister ships, the Exxon Valdez, but it will be phased out at the end of this year, and then we’ll have all double halled tankers.

But there’s a number of other things: there’s the Regional Citizen Advisory Counsels, where citizens now have a say and provide an oversight of the oil industry and government here in Alaska and that’s been extremely effective in getting these safety standards improved. The industry itself pays fifty to sixty million dollars a year for its Still Prevention Response System in Prince William Sound, which is a very good one. With the billion dollar settlement from Exxon, the government’s purchased conservation [INAUDIBLE] on hundreds of thousands of acres of critical fish and wildlife habitat in the coastal region around the region so there’s a number of good steps made, but I have to still point out that twenty years ago, the world was using around 66 million barrels of oil a day. Now, this year, today, twenty years later, we’re using about 86 million barrels of oil a day and so, one of the take home messages twenty years ago is that we have to do better with an energy policy in the nation and the world. Where we’re weaning ourselves off of this oil addiction and we really haven’t got there so that’s one of the unlearned lessons here that we feel we missed.

SK: Jerry McCune, let’s talk a little bit about Exxon and even the ship’s captain, Joseph Hazlewood, who has been acquitted of all criminal charges. He has issued an apology, but I can’t imagine that that’s worth very much to you and your colleagues right now.

JM: Actually, the last apology that he did, I pretty much accepted twenty years later. We all know that it’s not the ships usually, it’s the person running the ship that makes the mistake. Being a fisherman, I know a lot of people at first held a lot against Joe Hazlewood, but he was just the captain. And yeah, he made some major mistakes and probably was the primary principle person to that caused this. But twenty years later… He apologized and apologized. He’s just a person and he made a mistake and I accept that.

SK: What about Exxon? Exxon promised much in the few days following the disaster. They promised they would clean it up. They promised they would give you the best clean up that was possible. What is your message today to the heads of the CEOs, the Vice Presidents, et cetera of Exxon Mobile?

JM: Well, I would say that the biggest thing, no matter where they’re transporting oil, be prepared to have something on hand. I went over to LAF INAUDIBLE in 1988, Rick was with me, I think, there wasn’t any clean up crew, INAUDIBLE. And they knew it. Exxon Mobile, one thing is that, they’re very hard to work with. They said a lot of different things that they were going to do, but when it really gets down to it, it’s a company lying and they’re going to do everything to protect their company. They were not forthcoming in the things they said in the beginning and they fought it to the very end. I think fishermen were more equipped, could get there faster, than they could even do, the world’s largest oil company, and drop their arrogance a little bit and figure out how it works on these things and keep the prevention. Prevention is the key. And they keep wanting to drop the prevention. And I have to keep fighting that today. I’m not going to give up on letting them drop any prevention that’s going to help contain that oil in those ships because once it’s out of the ship, it’s not an easy thing to clean up, no matter what happens.

SK: And this is the company that has had the largest profits on record in history so we are talking about a company that can afford to be a lot safer. I want to turn back to Rick Steiner, Professor of the University of Alaska, and on to the issue of energy policy and oil spills in general. As Jerry was saying there’s an article today in the San Fransisco Chronicle saying, “Since 1993, US offshore drilling has sent an average of 47,800 barrels of oil a year into the sea.” According to data from the Mineral Management Service Offshore Drilling Platforms are particularly vulnerable to storms. Coast guard estimates that roughly nine million gallons of oil were spilled during Hurricanes Rita and Katrina alone and contrary to what the oil industry would like us to believe, there is no effective method for cleaning up an oil spill, and where there are tankers and offshore drilling, there will always be spills. In the wake of the twentieth anniversary of this disaster, what do you make of the U.S. governments new plan to sell offshore oil drilling leases and the continuing risks. Not only of course, to climate change, but the immediate risks when oil spills happen.

RS: Well, you again hit the nail right on the head there. What we have to take home from the Exxon Valdez is we have to be exceptionally cautious. And permitting oil and gas development. Either drilling or exploration or transportation, pipelines or with tankers, in these very precious coastal environments within which, if you do have a spill, as Jerry pointed out accurately, there’s very little you can do about it. Once the oil’s in the water, we know from all major oil spills around the world, that you cannot effectively contain it, you can’t clean beaches, you can’t rehabilitate oiled wildlife, you cannot restore a spilled oil ecosystem, and you cannot adequately compensate and you seldom do compensate the people’s lives you’ve turned upside down from these things. So you have to keep it from happening and there’s always a risk. With ships, with boats, we know there’s always a risk that something can go wrong. Even with the safety system we have in Prince William Sound. Even with double hulled tankers with double engines and double rudder systems, bowl thrusters and tug-escorts, and tracking systems, something can go wrong. And so, the question is, with all these offshored leases, should we be permitting these to happen in these incredible areas of incredible marine productivity, such as Bristol Bay, the largest red salmon fishery in the world, which is where Shell Oil and the Federal Government under the Bush Administration wanted to lease for offshore oil and gas and even in the Arctic Ocean, where there’s threatened resources there as well. So we have to be much more cautious about the decisions we make and know that things can break, things can go wrong, we can have a catastrophic spill and therefore, should we be permitting these activities?

SK: Well, finally I want to turn my last question to Jerry McCune, President of the Cordova District Fishermen United, where do you and your organization and fellow fishermen go from here? In trying to recover twenty years on from this disaster?

JM: Well, the biggest thing I’m working on is to keep the provension things in place right now. Alaska INAUDIBLE had a conversation about backing off the two escort tugs and there’s a resolution in the legislation down here in the state of Alaska to keep those tugs in, and our senators in Washington came out and said to keep them. You have to stay on top of them to make sure the provension things are in place, and of course I’m working with the guy who got left with no herring, and let’s see if there’s something we can do for those guys in the future.

SK: These are fishermen whose main livelihood was the herring and the herring is now gone.

JM: Yeah, some of them bought permits and they’re holding those permits and I’m still working with the Federal Government to see if I can get some kind of disaster thing going there so they can get some kind of compensation out of that. So far herring fishermen haven’t received a dime of anything.

Special Thanks to Celina for transcribing this interview