As we crossed the beach at Tonsina Bay, my concentration turned from the forested shores along the wide blue Gulf of Alaska to the cobblestones at my feet. My rubber boots slid like bald tires on thin ice. I set my notebook down so I could scramble faster behind my guide, a young woman named Julie Noffke from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. She was nearly invisible in her huge orange jumpsuit, rubber boots, and blue baseball cap. She didn’t say much; she just bobbed on along the water’s edge, taking notes in her own little book.
With Exxon crews slated to pull out in mid-September, these were the last days of the cleanup, but not of the spill. There is an insidious quality to this spill: the way it defies any technological fix, the way it changes but never really goes away. You worry if you see it, and you worry if you don’t. There is a contagious frustration among the Alaskans who are relentlessly trying to fix it–or at least to understand it.
Mahan said he had guessed by April that there would be no fishing this year and there would be no telling about the years to come. He started to get scared. He could have just filed a claim with Exxon, to compensate him for lost income, but he decided to work. And that meant working, through another contractor, for Exxon. Since the Bush administration decided early on not to federalize the spill cleanup, all responsibility for those operations remains with Exxon. The U.S. Coast Guard, the Alaska conservation department, and a dozen other state and federal agencies have monitored the effort and continue to offer recommendations, but ultimately Exxon calls the shots.
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“It’s like if somebody raped your sister, so you ask him to drive her home,” Mahan said. A lot of Alaskans don’t mince words, but some officials are more guarded. Senator Ted Stevens told the Anchorage Daily News, “I don’t think in this instance, with this company, federalization in the long run makes that much difference.” He said such a huge cleanup operation was bound to leave some people unhappy, no matter who was in charge.
Exxon’s spill workers aren’t getting much sympathy in town. I told a state oil-spill monitor how guilt-ridden Mahan had seemed, and he just shrugged. “It must be tough collecting all that money, huh?” In fact, the cleanup has torn the local economy into at least five new factions: the highly paid Exxon spill workers; the unemployed seafood-industry workers, who are still hoping for restitution; the state and federal spill monitors and analysts; the service sector that is feeding, housing, and entertaining all of the above; and finally the holdouts, who include fishermen, environmentalists, and do-it-yourselfers–who doggedly keep doing what they’re doing for the love of Alaska, or just for the hell of it. There are few successful holdouts this year.
From a legal perspective all this silence makes sense, but it means Exxon controls most of what appears in the press. Exxon’s late-May estimates of less than 100 dead otters and 300 dead birds were widely published. This could not quell public outrage over press photos of even a few freezing, oil-coated animals, but the anger might have been greater if information from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was more widely circulated. According to them, as of August 1 nearly 29,000 dead oiled birds had been recovered, but that represented only “five to fifteen percent of total oiled-bird mortalities.” That means 190,000 to more than 500,000 dead birds. “Most of the wildlife doesn’t die right on the beach where we can find it,” Randall explained. Besides, some of the “evidence” isn’t worth collecting anymore. The restitution values for some wildlife already have been set. For example, Exxon will pay $2.50 per gallon of dead stream salmon. “Who could afford to bring that in?” said Randall.
As Cy Asta flew the helicopter over the beaches, he and Noffke saw improvements and new damage that were lost on me. The dampness and chill of the night causes the oil on rock faces to soak in and harden. As the morning sun warms these cliffs, the oil bleeds out again. The glistening cliffs almost look beautiful–but they’re wrong.
