The Stain Will Remain On Alaska

By PAUL A. WITTEMAN VALDEZ

Men toting dark green duffel bags were filing off ships in Valdez, Alaska, last week and heading toward the phones, Mike's Pizza Palace or the bar at the Pipeline Club. Final paychecks were burning holes in thousands of pockets. The work force that spearheaded Exxon's $1 billion effort to erase the largest oil spill in U.S. history was calling it quits before the winter-storm season descends on Prince William Sound. Six months after the Exxon Valdez ran hard aground on Bligh Reef and dumped 260,000 bbl. of crude oil into one of the most scenic bodies of water in the world, the ship's owner was declaring the great cleanup of 1989 complete.

But not so fast, Exxon. While workers were filling planes and buses on the way home, Alaska Governor Steve Cowper and state environment commissioner Dennis Kelso called a press conference in Valdez. They named the "dirty dozen" beaches that they charge are still fouled with oil and announced their own modest $21 million winter cleanup program, at least part of which will be paid for by Exxon. The message to the company was clear: You didn't get the job done, and you're leaving too early.

Whether or not that is fair, everyone agrees that the damage from the catastrophic spill could not be undone so quickly. Much of the oil has been removed and much has been diluted beyond detection, but quite a bit remains. Though the area's wildlife populations will survive, their ranks have been reduced and are still suffering. No one knows how many years or decades it will take the land and water -- and the psyches of Alaskans -- to recover fully. The only certainty is that Exxon still faces a long siege of recriminations, lawsuits and expense as the company tries to atone for one of the most colossal corporate blunders of all time.

The most indelible image of the spill is that of dead and dying creatures. The body count so far includes 34,000 birds (among them were 139 bald eagles) and 984 sea otters. (One man also died, crushed in the dumbwaiter of a ship in the Exxon cleanup fleet.) Scientists believe the actual wildlife toll is much higher. Recovered bird carcasses, for example, may represent only 5% to 10% of the victims. Many dead otters disappeared under the water, and searches for other animals were limited to the high-water marks on some of the affected islands to respect the wishes of the Native Americans who own the land. The good news is that no species appears threatened with extinction because of the spill. Indeed, the area's otters had multiplied so rapidly in recent years that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was thinking about thinning them out before the spill did it, however horribly.

The commercial salmon catch in the sound this season was only 61% of the average for the past two years. Says Raymond Cesarini, president of Sea Hawk Seafoods in Valdez: "It's been a hideous year for us." Cesarini, who filed a lawsuit against Exxon, says he had expected to process 14 million lbs. of fish but got only 3 million. On a positive note, the three large commercial fish hatcheries in the spill's path were protected, and millions of salmon returned in late summer to spawn in glacial streams along the sound.

Antipathy toward Exxon threatens to obscure the fact that it mounted the largest response ever to an oil spill. The effort was like organizing an infantry division from scratch and deploying it in battle within 60 days. At the cleanup's peak, Exxon marshaled more than 1,400 boats, 85 aircraft and 11,300 people. With that mobilization came such daily logistic headaches as providing 200 tons of food and disposing of 1,400 gal. of human waste in a remote and unforgiving environment. "I think Exxon did a hell of a job," says David Usher, whose firm Marine Pollution Control has been cleaning up oil spills worldwide for 22 years. "They busted their butts."

After an embarrassing false start, during which workers futilely hand scrubbed individual rocks, Exxon refined some techniques that show promise for future oil-spill cleanups. The omni-sweep, a spray nozzle at the end of a 100- ft.-long mechanical arm, allowed workers to hose steep shorelines that were otherwise inaccessible. High-temperature, high-pressure rinses proved moderately effective in scouring oil-fouled rocky beaches, but they killed intertidal creatures such as barnacles and snails. Coast Guard Captain David Zawadzki compares the process with chemotherapy.

The most promising technique seemed to be spraying the fertilizer Inipol to promote the growth of naturally occurring microbes on the cobbled beaches where rocks were slathered with oil. Certain bacteria "eat" oil, but they grow slowly in Alaska because of the cool water temperatures. Inipol speeds the reproduction of the oil-consuming organisms, and once Exxon began spraying it on with pump-driven wands, beaches showed considerable improvement. "I was impressed with Smith Island," says biologist Jill Parker of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Before, you couldn't walk on it. It looks so much better." Exxon treated some 70 miles of shoreline with Inipol, almost half the area in the sound that was either heavily or moderately oiled.

Multiple treatments were necessary because beaches often became re-oiled. In many cases oil that had seeped down through shoreline sediments to a depth of as much as three feet was pumped back to the surface by 15-ft. tides. "We treated some of those areas as many as seven times," says Exxon spokesman David Sexton. In all, the company says, it recovered 61,000 bbl. of the 260,000 spilled. The $1 billion spent on the cleanup translates into $390 for each gallon of oil recovered.

What happened to the other 199,000 bbl.? Exxon professes not to know, a curious stance for a company that in other circumstances makes a corporate fetish out of accounting for every last barrel in its inventory. "I'm not going to speculate how much oil is left and where it is," says Sexton. As much as 25% of the crude may have evaporated in the early days after the spill. Much of the rest, guesses Lars Foyn, a fishery expert with the Marine Research Institute in Bergen, Norway, has become diluted in the water and disappeared. Most of the experts in Alaska privately agree with that dispiriting theory, but no one wants to be the first to say that the remaining oil has seeped irretrievably into the ecosystem.

Exxon maintains that the cleanup is a success. Says senior vice president K. Terry Koonce of the 1,100 miles of shoreline treated: "It's reasonably clean; it's pretty pristine." The Coast Guard, which must sign off on the work Exxon has done, is more guarded. "We don't like to use the word clean," says Captain Zawadzki. "It's not as easy as washing dishes." Protecting itself against future charges that it let Exxon off the hook, the Coast Guard will / certify only that the company's cleanup plan has been executed as described.

Alaska, meanwhile, has sued Exxon and the other oil companies that operate in the state for as yet unspecified damages. In a campaign of harassment (financed almost entirely from cleanup funds provided by Exxon), state officials manage to find fault at every turn. Says Steve Provant, a state cleanup coordinator: "I don't think any of the beaches are clean." Recently the state withheld approval for Exxon to use a floating incinerator it had brought to Alaska at a cost of $5 million after initially telling the company that burning was the preferred method of waste disposal.

The state has repeatedly criticized Exxon for failing to contain the oil in the days after it was spilled. But officials are less eager to admit that the state did almost nothing to make sure that the oil industry was prepared for a major accident. Over the past ten years, the staff of the state's oil- pollution-control management program was reduced from three people to one. Says Paul O'Brien, who ran the program until one month before the spill: "There weren't enough resources to do the job right. I was stretched pretty thin." After the accident, environment commissioner Kelso was quick to brand the industry's previously filed oil-spill contingency plan "the greatest piece of maritime fiction since Moby Dick." But he had approved the document.

In retrospect, it is clear that the state should have used more of its oil income (an estimated $2 billion a year) to regulate the industry more tightly. Instead, the oil money has flowed into entitlement programs, which pay all Alaska residents an annual stipend of some $800 and senior citizens an additional guaranteed income of $250 a month. Even today Alaska officials bristle at the suggestion that residents who benefit from oil shipments should be made to share some of the burden of safeguarding them.

The Alaska tragedy shows that no amount of money and finger pointing can compensate for a disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill. Once the oil got away, there was no way to clean it all up. Alaskans can only hope that the cleansing storms of winter will continue the scrubbing that Exxon merely started.