1999-03-24 04:00:00 PDT Cordova, Alaska -- It was a decade ago today that the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, hemorrhaging nearly 11 million gallons of black, viscous crude oil into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound.

That single incident devastated the sound, killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, thousands of marine mammals and untold numbers of fish and shellfish. Wind and tide carried the vast slick to the southwest, sullying more than 1,300 miles of shoreline.

Within days, one of the richest ecosystems on the planet was transformed into a reeking charnel house, a virtual ecological graveyard.

Today, the sound appears well on its way to recovery -- but no one can agree on just what "recovery" means.

Exxon Corp., which owns the ill-starred ship, claims the sound shows no long-term damage from the spill, and that fish and wildlife are at pre-spill levels.

Government biologists believe that most key species are rebounding to one degree or another, but maintain that the sound's essential ecological health remains compromised.

And in Cordova -- the biggest settlement on the sound after the oil port of Valdez, and the heart of the region's once-thriving fishing industry -- "recovery" is just an eight-letter word for deceit. For a sense of betrayal. For a bitterness so deep and pervasive that it has become as much an element of daily life as the craggy Chugach Mountains that tower over the hamlet.

Today, local waters are blue and pellucid and the air is as crisp and sweet as an autumn apple. Oil? There's no visible sign of it over the 15,000 square miles of open water, tidal flats, islands and forested littoral that constitute the sound.

But the great slick disgorged by the Exxon Valdez lingers in the hearts and minds of the people of Cordova, whose economic and spiritual connection with the sound has been irrevocably altered.

Before the spill, everyone thought that the future would always be like the past: Plenty of fish and shellfish to catch, multitudes of seals and birds to hunt, a sound that was both a groaning board of food and a source of spiritual solace.

These days, Cordova's 2,500 residents sense that the future will never be like the past. The town's fishing fleet is little more than half the size it was in 1988 -- down to 400 boats from 700. After the spill, three of the town's five canneries closed, including the biggest. Two have since reopened under new management, but at reduced production levels. The largest cannery remains shuttered.

And the malaise that affects the townspeople is deep and abiding.

"The one thing I've learned out of all this is that technological disasters are not like natural disasters," said Brian O'Neill, an acerbic, homespun Minnesota lawyer who, representing people who live around the sound, won a $5.3 billion punitive damages award against Exxon in federal district court in 1994.

"In a natural disaster, people still feel connected to their community and the land," said O'Neill. "But a technological disaster like this severs people from the planet. The damage is especially severe in communities like Cordova. They had a resource- based lifestyle -- the people depended on the land, water, fish and wildlife for their identities as much as their food."

Nevertheless, Prince William Sound is by no means a biological desert.

About 3,000 sea otters disport in Orca Inlet next to Cordova. Pink salmon, bolstered by government hatcheries, are nearing pre- spill numbers. Bald eagles are back at historic populations -- they perch nonchalantly in spruce trees along the harbor, hopefully scanning the tidal flats for a fish carcass. And halibut, a fish of great commercial value, are thriving.

Exxon uses these examples to buttress its contention that the sound is back to normal.

"It has essentially recovered," said Frank Sprow, Exxon's vice president for environment and safety. "The biological communities are in good shape. The situation there is similar to what we've found at other large spill sites. You have acute impacts, but they are relatively short-term. The oil degrades."

David Page, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, has performed post-spill scientific analyses of Prince William Sound for Exxon. He agrees with Sprow.

"Most of the spill zone recovered in two to three years," Page said. "Candidly, it was surprising how rapidly the sound recovered. About 99 percent of the oil was completely gone by 1994."

Exxon spent about $300 million in direct compensation to fishermen and other residents for economic losses, and shelled out an additional $1 billion in a civil settlement that is being used to purchase land around the sound. The company has also prescribed rigorous safety rules for tanker traffic and oil transport since the spill, and has bolstered its stockpile of oil-collection booms and storage barges.

But Exxon is fighting the $5.3 billion punitive damages award, saying it is excessive. The company appealed the ruling, and it is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals. Experts close to the case say they expect the company to appeal it to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

"It's simply not warranted," Sprow said. "We took responsibility since Day One, we apologized, we moved immediately to compensate those damaged, and we did our best to clean up the spill."

But Cordova residents say that the sound is far from healed and that Exxon is evading its responsibilities by challenging the punitive damages. When and if Exxon pays, the money will be divided among the region's fishermen and natives, based on estimates of the economic losses they have sustained.

Some of the sound's important commercial species have recovered and others haven't. Unfortunately, the one that's doing the best -- pink salmon, which is at about 90 percent of its pre-spill levels -- is no longer esteemed in the marketplace. Prices for the fish have crashed, a result of farmed Atlantic salmon from Chile and Scandinavia flooding the world market. And herring -- still an extremely valuable fishery, because the Japanese pay top prices for the roe -- remains at very low levels.

"Before the spill, my dad bought a salmon permit for $320,000," said Rob Maxwell, who manages Redden Marine, a maritime supply store and net mending facility, with his brother Mike.

"He sold it three years ago for $30,000," Maxwell said. "Then he lost his boat. Basically, he's lost his entire retirement. He's 65 now, and living on Social Security. So when we see Exxon fighting the punitive ruling, it makes us pretty mad."

Rob and Mike both still fish, but they don't know for how long. "We're just this far from losing everything," said Mike, separating his thumb and forefinger by a quarter-inch. "Unless Exxon pays up, we're finished."

Some fishermen have managed to hang on to their boats, but they are hardly in a celebratory mood.

"We're going out, but we're not optimistic," said Virgil Carroll, who repaired hydraulic lines last week with his son Doug on their purse seiner, the Miss Carroll, in preparation for the spring herring season.

The total herring fishery has plummeted from 135,000 metric tons before the spill to about 30,000 tons today. "The herring biomass is still low out there, and our quota from our fish processor is only 30 tons," Carroll said. "It isn't going to be a great season."

Cordova residents say their beef with Exxon isn't just about money. They miss the flush times, but they mourn the loss of the region's extraordinarily abundant wildlife even more. The sound, they say, was once infused with magic. Now, much of that magic has been lost.

"It's just not the same out there," said Bud Janson, a Tlingit native fisherman, as he nosed his boat, the Fish & Game, out of Cordova harbor. "Birds, marine mammals, a lot of fish and shellfish species -- they're all down. There's more on our side of the sound, which wasn't hit as hard as the west side. But it's still not what it was."

The spill delivered a particularly debilitating blow to natives, because it has restricted their access to traditional foods. Given a choice, said Janson, most natives will subsist almost entirely on wild foods -- game, fish, shellfish, sea vegetables and berries. Seal meat is especially important because of its high fat content and its role in native rituals and feasts.

"Many people are afraid to eat the seals now, because they migrate and you don't know if they've been eating fish that were contaminated from some (oily) pocket," he said. "It's a terrible thing, to be afraid of the food that has always sustained you."

Even worse, said Janson, is the way the spill has undermined native traditions. "You can't teach your kid how to hunt and fish for traditional foods if your can't find those foods, or if you're afraid to eat them," he said.

If some good came out of the spill, it is in the form of the land purchased by a trust established by the state and federal governments with the $1 billion civil settlement. About 650,000 acres of inviolate temperate rain forest and riverine habitat along the sound have been bought for preservation, mostly from native corporations.

But even this is not without controversy. Twenty years ago, the native corporations acquired vast tracts as part of a settlement with the federal government. The land represented a guarantee of both continued access to subsistence hunting and fishing as well as potential profits in the form of natural resources, such as timber.

Now many natives are questioning the wisdom of selling their land, even if it's for a good cause. This is especially true in Cordova. The town's population is 20 percent native, representing the largest settlement of indigenous people on the sound.

"If you lose the land, everything becomes very shaky," said Patience Andersen Faulkner, a Chugash native who is the housing coordinator for the Chugash Alaska Corp. "Many of the native corporations made the decision to sell because they're desperate, they're just trying to survive. It's a terrible position to be in."

Exxon says the only place to find significant oil is at Sleepy Bay, a northward facing inlet on LaTouche Island that has extensive areas of beach and cobble contaminated by subsurface oily residue. So many reporters have visited the site that locals call it "Media Beach."

The company and many of its scientific contractors say the oil in Sleepy Bay has negligible environmental impact. "If you took all the individual little oil paddies and blobs at Media Beach, you'd have an area the size of a basketball court," said Bowdoin College biochemistry professor Page.

But many independent and government biologists say otherwise.

"You can't paint a doom-and- gloom picture of the sound, because it is definitely getting better every year as storms come in and churn up and disperse the oil that remains," said Stanley "Jeep" Rice, a senior toxicologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service who has headed several studies of the Exxon Valdez spill.

"But having said that, there is still oil out there, and it's in several places, not just Sleepy Bay," Rice said. More ominously, he noted, recent studies by his team demonstrate that even minute traces of oil are far more toxic to aquatic life than previously thought.

Rice's group sprayed gravel with small quantities of oil, placed fertilized pink salmon eggs on the gravel, then immersed the gravel in running water. A control test was simultaneously conducted with eggs hatched on unoiled gravel. Researchers noted how many eggs died in both gravel plots. They then inserted tiny metal ID tags in the noses of the fish that hatched, and released them to the sound. When the fish returned two years later to spawn, researchers compared the mortality and deformity ratios of the two groups.

The result: Fewer fish from the oiled gravel returned. And those that did showed a dramatically higher ratio of tumors, lesions and deformities.

"What this basically means is that oil is toxic to fish eggs and larvae at spectacularly lower levels than we thought," said Rice. "It affects them at the parts per billion range rather than the parts per million range that was previously assumed."

Environmentalists say the study points to the essential reason behind the persistent decline of several of the sound's most important species.

"The link between trace levels of oil and damaged plankton, eggs and larvae is very strong," said Riki Ott, a marine biologist and former fisherwoman who lives in Cordova. "That has particularly severe consequences for a fish like herring, which are on a seven- to eight-year cycle. Once they're down, it takes them a long time to get back up. And if they're not getting annual recruitment because their eggs and larvae are being damaged, the stocks can be permanently depressed."

That has consequences for the entire sound, said Ott.

"Everything eats herring," she said. "Salmon, halibut, seals, otters, birds -- even big herring eat little herring. They're rich in fat, making them a tremendous calorie reservoir that keeps everything going. Without them, it's a catastrophe."

Not all of Cordova's woes can be blamed on the spill, of course. One of the few things that fishermen and Exxon agree on is that warm water incidents like El Nino may be depressing some fishery stocks.

Also, some species were already in decline before the spill, including harbor seal, shrimp, king crab and tanner crab. It is not clear whether the spill exacerbated those trends. And global market forces, such as the decline in salmon prices, are also a factor.

Ott thinks Cordova has to diversify to survive -- but only in ways that are environmentally sustainable.

"We have a heli-ski company that just came in, and we have a successful marketing program for Copper River king and sockeye salmon, which are recognized in the Lower 48 for their high quality," she said. "We need to add value to our other products -- specialty smoked salmon and locally processed roe for the sushi market, for example."

But other Cordovans aren't sure that's the best thing for the town. They say oil -- properly developed and rigorously regulated -- must remain a significant part of the sound's economic mix.

"Alaska has always had a resource-based economy -- fish, gold, oil, timber," observed Margy Johnson, a former mayor of the town and the owner of its largest hotel.

"That has always been what has sustained us," she said. "We don't want -- nor are we set up for -- industrial-strength tourism. Generally, we have a superb environmental record in this state. If we don't develop our oil, development will go to the (Middle East and the republics of the former Soviet Union). And they don't have our environmental regulations."

If the 10th anniversary of the spill has Cordova's residents grimly contemplating the past, it also has them apprehensively surveying the future. Supertankers continue to ply the sound daily. And despite the new safety measures, residents feel that another disastrous accident could happen at any time.

"Ten years ago, we didn't know what a spill like this could mean," said Janson, the native fisherman, as he guided his boat past a pod of sea otters munching on tube worms.

"Now we do. I don't care how many tugs they use now -- what happens if they have a bum tanker that just happens to break up? Or say there's a quake, and the (trans- Alaska oil) pipeline ruptures -- it crosses several major tributaries of the Copper River. Every day, you wake up worrying. What will happen next time?"


Bittersweet reminiscences between brews at much-loved saloon

"Just don't call it an anniversary," said the young man, a tall, muscular native fisherman with a wispy mustache.

He was weaving slightly from the several Rainier beers he had consumed, and his eyes seemed unnaturally bright -- but his words were clear and measured.

"Do you see us giving each other presents?" he demanded. "Do we look happy, like it's some kind of party? What happened 10 years ago wasn't a wedding. It was a goddamn tragedy."

That pretty much sums up the view at the Alaskan Bar, Cordova's favorite watering hole. Fishermen have been coming here for generations to celebrate bonanza catches or to grouse about empty nets.

This is a well-loved saloon. One of the bars came by ship around the Horn a century ago. The sign outside is upside down and always has been. No one knows why, though one wag suggested it's so drunks who fall flat on their backs on the sidewalk can read it and know where they are.

The Alaskan has seen good years and bad -- but the past 10 years have been unrelentingly bad, so bad that some simple, wistful recollections of the fat times send the usually boisterous patrons into quiet reverie.

"Before the spill, I'd pick up more money off the floor than I get in tips now," said bartender Cathy Brady. "I used to make $300 a night. Now I'm lucky if I make $20."

LeRoi Gilkison, a bearded, gray- haired fisherman with big, gnarled hands who has lived and worked in Cordova for 17 years, shook his head sadly at the memory.

"We used to tack $100 bills up on the ceiling all year long," he recalled. "At the end of the year, we'd take down all the money and have a huge party."

Gilkison took a sip of his drink and glanced up at the bar's ceiling, now devoid of greenbacks. "Been a long time since we had one of those," he said softly.

Gilkison, originally from Fremont, Calif., said Cordova was a fisher's paradise before the spill, and he described Prince William Sound as a cornucopia of valuable commercial species.

"Pink salmon, coho salmon, chum salmon, sockeye salmon, king salmon, herring," he said, ticking off the species on his fingers. "Black cod, halibut, Dungeness crab. We had it all. Just as a deckhand, I'd make $16,000 in a season. Now I'm lucky to make $4,000. Most of the boats have been repossessed. The whole industry has been devastated."

Gilkison allows that some species, such as king and tanner crab, were in decline before the spill.

"You expect natural cycles, but (the decline after the spill) was way off the scale. This little town was once one of the top 10 seafood producers in the country -- now we're lucky to scrape by at a survival level."

Dean Kramer, an Aleut native who has been fishing the sound since 1962, said commercial and subsistence fishing is the foundation of Cordova's identity.

"My dad died while fishing the (Copper River) Flats," he said. "I'm a commercial gill netter -- that's what I've always done, and it's what I always want to do. There's been talk about setting Cordova up as a tourist destination, but most of us don't want that. We're not set up for it. The idea of catering to tourists doesn't appeal to us."

Kramer scoffed at Exxon claims that the oil has left no lasting effect on the sound.

"It's still out there, in lots of places," he said. "It's still easy to find, and it's still affecting the ecosystem. I don't care what the Exxon scientists say -- the fishermen, the people who live here, know otherwise."

Tough as times are, the patrons of the Alaskan seem determined to hang on. Alaska exerts a hold on its residents that is often hard for people from Outside to fathom.

"I'm from Tatiklek," Kramer said simply, naming a small Aleut village north of Cordova and subtly implying that even the idea of moving is absurd. "This place is my home."

And for some at the Alaskan, even post-spill Cordova beats most other places.

"I immigrated from Eritrea," said Hana Tekaste, a petite woman with regal posture and no-nonsense demeanor who tends bar.

Tekaste is revered by the fishermen at the Alaskan, who simultaneously seem enamored of her and afraid of offending her sensibilities regarding proper tavern decorum.

"It's beautiful in Eritrea, and I miss the countryside and my family," she said. "But there was war when I left, and war going on now. It's tough in Cordova, but not as tough as back home. I love it here."


Hazelwood can't find job piloting a ship

Joseph Hazelwood, who was captain of the Exxon Valdez when it ran aground on Bligh Reef, has been striving to put the incident behind him -- with only mixed success.

After the spill, Hazelwood was jailed for a short period. He was eventually acquitted of all charges but one -- a misdemeanor for the negligent discharge of oil.

Hazelwood was ordered to perform 1,000 hours of community service and is expected to return to Alaska this summer, where he will pick up trash along state highways to comply with his sentence.

In Cordova, his name still evokes sneers, grimaces or a simple steely gaze that speaks volumes.

Hazelwood, who had a history of alcoholism, was drinking belowdecks, having left the helm to the ship's third mate, when the tanker hit the reef.

The Coast Guard suspended his captain's license, but it was reinstated after nine months. Still, no company would hire him to pilot a ship. He now lives on Long Island, working as a maritime insurance adjuster.


Its catastrophic encounter with Bligh Reef notwithstanding, the Exxon Valdez may once again ply the waters of Prince William Sound -- and San Francisco Bay.

The supertanker was banned from the sound as a result of the federal 1990 Oil Pollution Act, which specifically bars any vessel that spilled more than 1 million gallons of oil after March 22, 1989, from ever sailing there.

But now Exxon Corp. wants to put the behemoth tanker back on its old route, claiming that it is a superbly designed and innately safe ship that should be used for its intended purpose -- hauling raw crude from Valdez to refineries in the East Bay and in Southern California.

"It was never a question of the ship being unsafe," said Frank Sprow, Exxon's vice president for environment and safety, addressing the issue of culpability in the spill. "It was a matter of human error."

After the spill, the Exxon Valdez was renamed the SeaRiver Mediterranean and dispatched to the Mediterranean Sea, where it now shuttles Middle East oil to various ports. But it is ill-suited for such work, claims Sprow.

"Mediterranean ports aren't very large and they're relatively shallow," Sprow said. "The ship can't carry a full load, so it really isn't being used to optimal advantage. It was designed with one goal in mind -- to safely carry large quantities of Alaskan oil to California refineries."

Exxon has filed two unsuccessful suits in an attempt to bring the SeaRiver Mediterranean "home" to Alaska, arguing that banishing the vessel constitutes an unconstitutional taking of its property. The targets of the suits are the Transportation Department, the attorney general and the Justice Department. The matter is currently on appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeal in San Francisco.

Regardless of the name it currently bears, the ship is still remembered as the Exxon Valdez in the small communities that dot Prince William Sound, and it still casts a long, dark shadow.

It is viewed with particular loathing in Cordova, where most people blame the spill for breaking the community, both socially and economically.

"If they bring it back, it will negate the only real punishment the company received," said Michelle Hahn O'Leary, a Cordova resident who commercially fishes, along with her husband, Michael, for herring and salmon. "It will be a slap in the face of everyone who lives here."

Some feel that Exxon's attempt to bring the tanker back to Valdez is a crass power play.

"They want to rub people's noses in it," said Brian O'Neill, the Minnesota attorney who won a $5.3 billion punitive damages award against Exxon. "They sued twice to get the Exxon Valdez back in Alaskan waters, and they've been twisting legislators' arms shamelessly, trying to get the 1990 Oil Pollution Act amended or repealed. They can't stand the idea of losing."

But Cordova biologist and former commercial fisherwoman Riki Ott -- a foe of the oil business and no apologist for Exxon -- doesn't think the company is driven by a such a Byzantine rationale.

"For Exxon, it's all about money," she said. "That's the bottom line."


Prince William Sound is still recovering from the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Here's a look at how some animals and ecosystems are doing:


1 Bald eagle -- After the spill, an estimated 250 bald eagles died out of a population of 6,000 that lived around the sound. By 1995, the population had rebounded.

2 River otter


1 Common mure -- Hardest hit among birds was the common murre. Some 40 percent of the area's population died after the spill. Now they appear to be recovering.

2 Black oystercatcher

3 Marbled murrelet -- Populations of this elusive seabird dropped 7 percent after the spill.

4 Sea otter

5 Pacific herring -- The herring population collapsed after the spill, forcing the commercial herring fishery in Prince William Sound to close for four years.

6 Pink salmon -- Egg mortalities among pink salmon -- the sound's dominant salmon species -- hae returned to normal levels.

7 Sockeye salmon

8 Clams

9 Mussels (right arrow)


1 Killer whale -- About 100 whales in six groups used the sound. One pod of 36 whales lost 14 members after the spill and has still not recovered. Killer whales are spending less time in the sound.

2 Common loon

3 Harbor seal -- Harbor seals in the Gulf of Alaska have declined 80 percent over the past 20 years. Changes in food supply and increased predation by killer whales may be major factors.

4 Cormorant

5 Pigeon guillemot



Just after midnight on March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef, dumping 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

The oil reached 1,300 miles of coastline and killed staggering numbers of wildlife, including 300,000 birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 seals and perhaps billions of salmon and herring larvae.

It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history.


The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable causes to be:

Failure of the third mate to properly maneuver the vessel because of fatigue and excessive workload.

-- Failure of the captain to provide a proper navigation watch because of impairment from alcohol.

-- Failure of the Exxon Corp. to provide a fit captain and a rested and sufficient crew.

-- Lack of effective vessel-traffic and pilotage services.


A virtual army was deployed to fight the spill, including up to 10,000 workers, 1,000 boats and 100 aircraft. Total cost of the cleanup was $2.5 billion.

-- Workers deployed booms to contain the oil, skimmer boats to vacuum it off the surface, chemical dispersants to break it up and steam to clean it off beaches.

-- Even so, efforts to save oiled wildlife were usually futile. The average survival time for an oiled bird that had been cleaned and released was six to 11 days.


Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which increased polluter liability for spills, set up a $1 billion national cleanup fund and required tankers to be double-hulled by 2015.

-- The law is credited with reducing the number of large spills from oil tankers (100,000 gallons or more) by 66 percent.

-- In Prince William Sound, powerful tugboats now escort tankers to ensure safer operations and locally trained pilots are in charge of the tanker's wheelhouse.

CHART (1):	

In sediment                 13%	
On shoreline                 2%	
In water column    less than 1%	
Recovered/disposed          14%	
Evaporated                  20%	
Biodegraded                 50%	
1992 survey	

Sources: Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, Associated Press and 
Chronicle research

CHART (2): A COSTLY ACCIDENT The Exxon Valdez spill resulted in the largest criminal and civil settlement in the history of environmental protection. A breakdown of Exxon's costs: Initial payments to fishermen and Alaska natives $300 million Civil settlement with state and federal government $1,000 million Criminal fines $25 million Exxon's total cleanup costs $2,000 million Total $3,325 million . Punitive damages awarded to commercial fishermen and Alaska natives in a 1994 jury verdict $5.3 billion Amount of punititve damages Exxon has paid so far $0 . SOURCE: Chronicle research