Thirty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster, events of that day, and what followed are still vivid in the mind of Steve Cowper, Alaska’s sixth governor, who was in Fairbanks on the morning of March 24, 1989, when he got word of the spill.
“Everybody probably could have thought of something they could have done, but you don’t get that luxury in real life,” he said.
Cowper had headed down to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner early that morning to talk with reporter Sam Bishop, and Bishop asked him what he thought about the oil spill.
“I said ‘what spill’” Cowper said. “People didn’t know anything at 7:30 in the morning. All they knew was that a ship had hit a reef and there was oil in the water.”
He hopped an Alaska Airlines flight to Anchorage and Alaska State Troopers flew him to Valdez. When he arrived, there were a huge crowd standing around on the airstrip with nowhere to go, including a mob of reporters, many of them from Europe, he said.
One of them was the French oceanographic explorer, environmentalist and film producer Jean-Michel Cousteau, who focused his camera on Cowper and asked if the governor now thought that it was a mistake for Alaska to have gotten into the oil business.
“I said that of course we were going to continue to produce oil and gas,” Cowper said. “The people who were opposed to the industry thought they were right and that it (the spill) proved everything they were saying was true, and (since then) nobody’s changed their minds about anything.”
Someone with a boat took Cowper, state Commissioner of Environmental Conservation Denny Takahashi-Kelso and a television photographer out to the Exxon Valdez, which was piled up on Bligh Reef. “The tide had gone out, so it was way up there,” said Cowper.
To get onboard, they had to use the Jacob’s ladder, a rope ladder with wooden steps.
Cowper, a former maritime lawyer, scrambled up the ladder along with Kelso, while the television photographer froze, so they grabbed his camera equipment and then he made it on board, where they were told by the third mate that Exxon-Valdez Capt. Joe Hazelwood declined to speak with him, Cowper said.
What had happened was there were icebergs in the shipping lane, so the captain had called the Coast Guard and asked permission to parallel the shipping lanes in a certain direction, and that direction took the ship directly into Bligh Reef, he said.
The third mate, whom Hazelwood had put in charge, gave orders to the helmsman, “who didn’t know what he was doing and neither did the third mate,” he said.
Then the vessel went aground on Bligh Reef, rupturing the tanks and hemorrhaging oil.
“This reef had been on the charts for 200 years and they ran into it anyway,” Cowper said.
The reef itself is named after William Bligh, who served as master aboard ship for James Cook’s third world voyage. Bligh was later the commander of the HMS Bounty at the time of the 1789 mutiny on that ship, commemorated in the 1932 novel “Mutiny on the Bounty.”
On the day of the spill, which began before dawn, the weather was good, Cowper said. “The oil was just sitting there, and if anybody had a skimmer they could have gotten a lot of it, but nobody did anything.
“The weather was real good. The sun was out and not a lot of wind and the oil was just pooling alongside of the tanker. By the time we got the skimmers from the pipeline people, the weather had moved in and scattered the oil all over the place, and the oil headed for the hatcheries,” he said.
“The herring run got murdered and the herring never did come back. The fishermen saved the hatcheries,” he said.
The fishermen, seeing nobody else responding, grabbed buckets and fish pumps and said to hell with safety and regulations, recalled a former seafood processing worker, speaking on condition of anonymity. And it was the fishermen who formed barriers across the entrances to the hatcheries, she said.
The people who were supposed to respond had the equipment, but they had it hidden in warehouses and it took then about 10 days to find it, by which time it was too late, Cowper said. So the fishermen sprang into action, and Cowper scrambled to find any and all possible equipment. He called the commander in chief of the U.S. Navy of the Pacific in Hawaii, who flew boom and skimmers into Valdez on C130s.
Then Cowper called the Russians,” who had the biggest skimmer in the entire world. The Russians, if you ask them for help, they will always do it, but that skimmer was in Vietnam,” he said. By the time the Russian skimmer, the Vaydaghubsky, arrived several days later “all the oil in the water was gummed up with logs and seaweed and fish nets and driftwood and they couldn’t get through it,” he said.
Early on after the spill, Cowper recalled, someone on site with an oil industry related position proposed using a substance he said would sink the oil to the bottom of Prince William Sound where nobody would see it. On the advice of Kelso, who later went on to a distinguished career in ocean conservation, Cowper said no.
That substance was most certainly the chemical dispersant Corexit 9527, according to marine conservation biologist Rick Steiner, a former marine conservation professor with the University of Alaska, who now travels worldwide as Oasis Earth Environmental Sustainability Consulting.
“They did try applying some in the first few days,” Steiner said. “It didn’t work, and Alyeska (Pipeline Service Company) didn’t have much available. They then tried some a few weeks later out in the Gulf. I was on aircraft with remote sensing equipment over those tests, and they too did not work.”
“The dispersant is toxic in its own, and perhaps even more so when combined with crude oil,” he said.
Such dispersants are controversial, and as a general rule not recommended, Steiner said.
“They should certainly never be used near shore or in shallow waters,” he said.
It was, Cowper wrote later in his own many reflections of the disaster, “an iconic event that led directly to the distaste of the oil industry in the U.S. today.
“People used it as proof that the Hollywood version of the oil industry was right,” Cowper said. “Never underestimate the power of a dramatic event.”
See all of our 30 Years of Healing: Reflecting on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill coverage here.
