TATITLEK, Alaska -- It was a few minutes after midnight when the big ship fetched up on Bligh Reef in the icy waters of Prince William Sound. And even today, nearing the 10th anniversary of one of the nation's worst environmental disasters, the oil spill by Exxon Valdez, which is barred by law from ever returning, is in many ways still here.
In environmental terms, the sound is still recovering, according to a report issued recently by the joint federal and state council that monitors the continuing effects of the tanker accident, which dumped at least 10.8 million gallons of North Slope crude into the sound and blackened 1,500 miles of the Gulf of Alaska coastline.
Of the 28 species listed in the report, only two -- the bald eagle and the river otter -- are considered to be "fully recovered" a decade later. For the ecosystem in general and for most other species, substantial progress has been made toward recovery but "there is a long way yet to go," according to the council's director.
Legally, the Valdez case drags on. Five years after a federal jury ordered Exxon to pay a record $5 billion in punitive fines to the thousands of villagers and commercial fishermen hurt by the spill, the company has yet to pay any of the judgment, challenging it in an appeals process that may continue for years.
And even the ship itself remains in the news. It has been repaired and renamed the SeaRiver Mediterranean, and the Exxon subsidiary that owns it, challenging the federal law that prohibits the tanker from returning to Alaska, has been seeking permission for it to come back to Prince William Sound.
For many people who live here, the idea of the tanker's returning is "just too much," said Gary P. Kompkoff, president of the village council in Tatitlek, a small Aleut community three miles from where the ship went aground.
Within hours of the spill, on March 24, 1989, Exxon and most of the people who live in the area around the sound here were in disagreement over just how bad its effects would be, and 10 years later, they still are.
Exxon says the area has "essentially recovered" by any reasonable measure, and the company's vice president for environment, Frank B. Sprow, said that while any oil spill is an unfortunate event, studies by the company and independent scientists have found no long-term harm.
The notion that the sound has recovered is deeply and bitterly disputed by many of the roughly 20,000 people who live in the areas that were most directly affected by the spill, which killed 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles and up to 22 killer whales, according to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, the federal-state monitoring agency.
"It's not back to what it was -- no way at all," said Gail Evanoff, the council president in Chenega Bay. Evanoff, as well as officials of the trustee council, said there were still small pockets along the beaches and in rock crevices where small pools of oil and tar balls can be found.
In Cordova, a fishing village, there is still visceral anger at Exxon, and many people blame the oil company for a downturn in their fortunes -- declining Pacific herring runs and a sharp falloff in the value of commercial fishing permits, particularly for herring.
Sylvia Lange, 46, who comes from a longtime fishing family and with her husband has been struggling to maintain a fish-processing plant in Cordova, said she believed the damage to the sound and the people who make their living from it could be compared in many ways to a rape.
"I can say with utmost certainty that there is no such thing as a true 'cleanup' here," Lange said. "You can put on makeup and make a show of it and say, 'Oh, it must be better again.' But it's not."
Exxon vigorously disputes such claims and notes that many of the people who are still complaining about the spill received compensatory payments in 1989 and 1990 that amounted to several times their normal annual income.
Herring spawning has indeed sharply declined since 1989 -- from 100,000 metric tons to 16,000 by 1993 and now around 30,000, said Stan Senner, science coordinator of the trustee council. But Exxon says such declines are part of normal fluctuations in the ocean and cannot be attributed to the spill. Runs of salmon, which make vast migrations and were much less directly affected by the spill, have remained strong.
The trustee council, which was financed with money from the government's settlement, reached several conclusions in the recent report. The good news was that bald eagles, which can be seen all around here and which were enumerated in surveys before the spill, are flourishing and are thus considered "recovered." River otters no longer indicate elevated levels of the blood chemicals that indicate oil exposure, and so they too were declared recovered.
But several bird species and marine mammals -- including common loons, three species of cormorants, harbor seals, harlequin ducks and the killer whales of Prince William Sound -- have shown no significant recovery, according to the report.
Pub Date: 3/07/99