Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters

December 11, 2008
Exxon: Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters
-AKA-
Why Exactly Is It That They Call It "Good" Friday?

Alaskans are a bit leery of Good Friday. First of all, the Christians have never exactly explained what is so good about the day that Jesus was killed and buried. But more particularly in this State, we've come to be distrustful of the date of that occasion! Possibly the two most major disasters in recorded Alaskan history were the "Good Friday earthquake" of 1964 and the "Good Friday grounding of the Exxon Valdez" in 1989.

Which brings us to the "Big News" of the last few days for many folks around these parts. The first "micro-checks" started showing up from that semi-mythical creature known as the "Exxon claims". This is the first money fishermen have seen from the 1994 jury determination to punish Exxon for deciding to let a known-to-the-company drunk command a massive ship full of oil through tight narrows, ship-lane clogging icebergs, reefs, shoals and rocks, at night.

Unfortunately there are two problems with the funds (not actually checks yet) that are finally arriving. Well, three if you count the cause.

Problem 1: They are at least 15 years late in arriving;
Problem 2: They are at least a decimal place too small; and
Problem 3: They demonstrate that our system of justice has been sold to the highest bidder. And the American citizenry didn't win the bid.

The "Wreck of the Exxon Valdez" has been written about enough to begin to wonder if all the trees cut to make paper for the books, newspapers and magazines are adding substantively to the environmental damage caused by the "accident". That said:

"Critics ranked in serried rows,
Fill the enormous plaza full.
But there is only one who knows,
And that's the man who fights the bull."

Not many of the accounts are written by individuals who were [or would have been (!)] commercial fishermen in 1989 who were beached for the summer due to the oil spill.

I, however, am one of those fishermen.

Indeed, I'm fairly well connected with the fishing community. My father was an Alaskan commercial fisherman. My grandfather was an Alaskan commercial fisherman! [I'm one of very few people who has no Native blood that can make that claim; and one of a tiny handful of folks over the age of 50 that can! :-)] I was fishing (captaining) a "cannery boat" before I was of legal age to work most of the jobs in the cannery (and making vastly more money than my high school classmates who were working the brutally exhausting and wretchedly slimy cannery jobs and hating me! :-) My brothers, uncles, cousins ... and every other legal and illegal relationship possible, including my wife ... were (and/or are) commercial fisherfolk. I know a great number of the Exxon claimants. I know many of the lawyers who represented them. I am very well acquainted with the law. I have followed this fascinating debacle for two decades and been intimately involved in parts of it. I believe that I can shed light in places and on issues in ways it hasn't previously been shed. I can't think of anyone more qualified to write about it from my particular unique perspective than myself! :-)

And so I shall.

The Exxon-Valdez, a single-hulled [ie: cheaper] oil tanker, didn't make it that night (actually, slightly after midnight on the morning of) March 24, 1989. The so appropriately named tanker run and owned by Exxon was attempting to leave Valdez, a little town in Prince William Sound ("PWS") which was, the day before, one of the most beautiful, scenic and pristine bays in the world. It was not only an unfortunate place, but also an unfortunate date as it was only shortly before the commercial, sport and "guided sport" fishing seasons started in the Sound in earnest.

Captain "Slam Drunk" Hazelwood wasn't even on the bridge. He was already inebriated before the ship ever left harbor; having ("reasonably" if you are an Exxon lawyer) spent the time while it was being loaded doing the same to himself at two local bars. The report that he had ordered a double shot of "exxon on the rocks" has been widely discredited.

His crew and other Exxon employees finished loading the sloshing oil and the sloshed Captain on board without finding any problems worth reporting regarding either.
Yeah, yeah, they just wanted to keep their jobs and he was the Captain after all. As employees of the ultimate corporate bureaucratic behemoth no one wanted to, shall we say, "rock the boat". Exxon liked to keep problems quiet, follow the "chain of command", demand and reward "loyalty" as defined by the company, and already knew Hazelwood was a drunk. Why risk your job going over the lolling head of your Captain to report that he had to be poured aboard once again?

"Just following orders", the phrase and concept made famous in the Nuremberg trials, is as robust as ever. It seems to me that a "responsible corporate citizen", yet another multiply self-contradictory phrase, indeed in competition for oxymoronic fame, that Alice can add to her pre-breakfast belief menu, would perhaps terminate (aka: "fire") crew persons who failed report that the Captain was drunk, especially given the potential for horrendous damage if the vessel was not intelligently, even wisely, captained through the Sound. But that isn't the way Exxon works. I have little doubt that the "just keep our mouths shut and hope to hold onto the job until retirement" employees were absolutely correct that it was in their personal best interests to "look the other way" (and not listen or smell either) when the Captain was ... loaded, in several meanings of the word.

It destroyed ecosystems and habitat. It played destructive havoc with important renewable commercial fishing and harvesting resources. [In Alaska a huge percentage of our revenue comes from oil and we are not raising and killing any new dinosaurs; it is a critical value of the fishing industries that they are renewable. Properly managed ... and absent massive oil spills, the salmon and herring and other should continue returning and reproducing in vast quantities for the foreseeable future.]

Fisheries were closed as giant sheets of black oil spread like ink across the waters. For nearly three calm and peaceful days Exxon's [and soon the State's and anyone else's that could be found] cleanup crews, equipment and operations put floating booms around the ship to try to contain the oil while they held meetings. There were ideas and suggestions. "Burn it! Just toss a match over board!" ... "Bacteria are the answer. They can be designed and 'trained' to 'eat' oil!" ... "Chemicals are the only answer. Neutralize it, break it down, destroy it." and on and on until the seas stopped taking a holiday. Many "experts" from out-of-state didn't truly understand the wilds of the Alaskan ocean. The wind arose mightily pushing the floating oil through, over and under the booms like they were child's toys. It drove the oil to the sands and rocks of the shore.

"And that it was buried, and the waves rose again on the third day according to the scriptures."

Ok. So maybe the scriptures weren't involved. But it was becoming a disaster of Biblical proportions. Fishermen pulled crab pots full of black oily tar; and crabs that were covered in it. They pulled shrimp pots so tarred that the fishing boats that they carried them back to shore on were condemned ... the boats were too badly oiled to ever carry "foodstuffs" again. The salmon and herring fishermen looked at the waters where they would have, in so much the same way that Jesus's disciples did 2,000 years earlier, cast their nets ... and saw the waters covered with black oozing goo. The fisheries in the Sound were closed costing the communities that had little else in the way of income, their entire year's earnings. It would have been pointless to let them fish. The market for Alaska seafoods had disappeared overnight.

This "market effect" of the news of the spill did substantial economic damage to many fishermen far away from the oiled fishing areas; but they had no apparent "standing" to bring a claim against Exxon even though the effects of Exxon's actions harmed them greatly. Again, many of these folks lost their livelihoods --their businesses -- because of Exxon.

Fishing is always a a gamble; sometimes a great single day can bring substantial revenue (my Mom always claimed that commercial fishing ruined more good men than drink did :-), but mostly the margins are very tight and a single major event (such as the Exxon caused price crash) can "sink" the business. It is of note that Alaska salmon prices have never again approached the prices that they fetched before Exxon took the mystique out of "from Alaska's pristine waters". The state has even tried setting up its own marketing department to attempt to bring back the "image" of the "brand". But now, when people hear "Alaska wild salmon" the picture they conjure is as likely to be of black, oiled waters as it is of pristine nature.] Oh ... I must get in a plug for the fisherfolks' product! Many recent studies have shown that Alaska caught salmon are indeed clean and as toxin-free as any in the world and, overall, perhaps the healthiest fish you can eat (salmon oil is nearly a miracle drug).

It is possible to calculate some of those direct damages and make educated guesses as to how much money the fishermen lost that summer. But it was not, and still is not, possible to accurately determine the long-term effects of the destruction of habitat . Entire eco-systems crashed with unknowable results. One example out of hundreds; perhaps thousands: Murres are noisy, dirty, raucous birds that have never found a market value. There were, at the most optimistic, up to 350,000 in the area of PWS at the time of the spill. 16,600 were reported dead. "Reported dead" means that the bodies were actually recovered. Although the experts certainly all took their shots ... it is anyone's guess what percentage of the birds that died had bodies that were actually recovered. Some say the actual death rate should be calculated to be six times larger than the number of bodies recovered. Others said at least ten times. But no one knows. And no one knows how many died later because their food was killed, destroyed, removed ... or, in the spring when they fed their babies, poisoned.

What is the value of that devastation of the murre population? Exxon's lawyers say that in terms of financial damages ... the number is zero; and that therefore Exxon should not have to pay anything for having caused such widespread destruction.

Exxon did dump money into the (probably more harm than good) "cleanup" and in extremely modest "negotiated fines" from the State (not much in comparison to the damages they did, according to the jury and essentially everyone who wasn't on the payroll of Exxon or some other multinational corporation). Even their insurance companies sued them claiming it was just a P.R. ploy! To this day the argument continues as to whether the cleanup did any good (beyond its obvious P.R. value which did Exxon potentially billions of dollars of good). Oiled rocks were laboriously washed by hand ... and then set back down on the beach beneath which .............~~~~~Scrubbing Rocks By Hand Foolishness~~~~~............. lurked huge piles of oil which surfaced randomly over the next couple of decades and is still doing so today. They used harsh chemicals which killed more of the life at the bottom of the food chain [which ultimately killed, and continues to kill, the life at the top of the food chain as well which included the "life of a fisherman in PWS"]. They used scalding hot water which killed corals and shellfish. No one knew what to do, or even who was "in charge", so no one knew who was to tell them what to tell them to do and what not to do ... the answers to which no one seemed to know in any event.
There are now salmon fisheries in the Sound although they can't be described as "recovered". The herring largely disappeared.

There has not been a shrimp season since the spill.

Nor does it seem, imho, that washing the oil back into the Sound with high pressure hoses would do the shrimp (or any other marine populations any good). And washing rocks by hand? Please! We didn't appreciate the insult to our intelligence. There were 1300 miles of oiled coastline! Let's see ... hire 1300 people, hand them a rag and some industrial strength cleaners and tell them to clean a mile of beach each. Well, at least the court case would have been resolved before the beach was cleaned! Oil, as any home mechanic is aware, is tough stuff to clean off! And Alaska crude ... the crudest, tarriest, ugliest of them all is a lot tougher than a spilled can of engine oil.

They may as well have put models in swimsuits out there it was so obviously for P.R. show!

It has never been easy to live the life of a fisherman in a small Alaskan fishing village. The hardships are tremendous. But the rewards of the lifestyle were of such a value that most people would never be able to experience or even understand. It is very difficult for, say, Supreme Court Justices who live in gated, gardened and guarded subdivisions and work in fancy air conditioned offices in the urban East to have any understanding of the value of this lifestyle for the people who (sometimes overcoming tremendous obstacles) have chosen it.

To be an Alaskan fisherman has such magnetic [it attracts men and women made of steel :-)] romance! It is a true dearly held dream of so very many people in the world. To be one of the last "free people" answerable to no one but your God if you have one and dependent upon no one and no thing except Nature, is such a rarity (and like so many dreams, not entirely accurate). But there is something magical about a life spent living off what nature provides; being among the last of the hunter/gatherers. Kids in cities watch the "Perfect Storm" and read about green, untrained deck hands on the boats of crab fishermen who, because they have to risk that sort of thrilling danger (and because the King Crab is such an expensive delicacy) can make $30,000 or more in a college summer vacation ... and look out the window at the soot-stained dirty gray of the city and dream the age-old dream. Few of course succeed at making their dream live. It is a long trip from New York desk jockey to Kodiak fisherman and I'm not referring to miles. Those that make it are the ones to whom its value is incalculable.

Pinned to my wall I have a small yellowed newspaper clipping. I don't know who wrote it. I do remember that the article was about the unique possiblities of the Last Frontier:

"The trapper, the miner, the commercial fishermen -- are free agents -- they dictate their own hours, direct their own labors, and when it suits them, tell people to go to hell."

To be part of that ... probably very close to the last generation for whom such is even possible means the difference between a life lived and an existence endured for many more than achieve it. It is not an easy lifestyle! Besides the backbreaking hard physical work, one must pay a substantial amount of money to get into the business. You must buy a boat or beach-site, fishing gear including nets, skiffs (on the beach, the boats they use to pick fish from are called "dories"), a fisheries permit for the fishery you wish to participate in [some permits for some fisheries sold for nearly $1 million before the spill!]. And on a bad year ... when the fish don't show or the weather was too bad to fish during the very short "height" of the run or the Fish and Game closes the fishery at the wrong time based on poor data or the boat didn't start on the "big day" (sometimes an entire season comes down to a single one-day "period" where you might make half of your income for the entire summer) or you ran it onto a sand bar through stupidity and lack of sleep when leaving the harbor at 3 a.m. or any number of other possible "things that can go wrong"... you don't make any money. It was a major struggle to "make it" in that life before the spill. Afterwards, in many parts of the state, it largely became impossible.

With no income, many fisherfolk who valued their rugged independent lifestyle had to move to the city, to Anchorage, and take desk jobs to survive. Some left the State where they were born and/or planned on living out the remainder of their lives. Some, in a personal shame that will haunt them all their lives and that the beggers of Telegraph Avenue would be incapable of comprehending, accepted handouts. First from churches and charities, later ... foodstamps and welfare. And they broke inside. And their children watch them break inside. Something far more valuable than money was lost that summer.

Yet money was the only thing the courts or anyone else could offer in exchange for what had been so rudely and stupidly taken by the foul recklessness of an oil company that simply didn't care enough to take the most basic precautions; and a captain who found the contents of a pint bottle far more important than 200,000 tons of oil.

It took Exxon nearly 20 years. Two decades of constant effort. But they succeeded at ensuring that not only did they not replace the irreplaceable. But they ensured that they wouldn't have to pay the people whose livelihood ... whose pristine thousands of miles of "front yard" had been destroyed ... any substantive amounts of money as punishment for their actions. Could a giant international globalist corporation that earned net profits of over $5 billion a year [now, 20 years later, closer to $5 billion a month] buy "justice" ... or would America and its wonderful long history of an independent court system that treats the rich and poor alike prevail?

It took 20 years. But at last, we now have the answer.

Part 2 of This Series May be Viewed Here: