Tuesday, March 24, 2009, is the 20th anniversary of the worst industrial disaster in American history. Early in the morning of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez went hard aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, poisoning one of North American's great ecosystems. The once great fisheries of the Sound have still not recovered, and neither have the people most affected by the spill.
Please join me on Tuesday in wearing a black arm band to remind everyone that sees you that the oil is still there in the beaches, continuing to poison the ecosystem, and that Exxon Corporation has still not made the plaintiffs in their lawsuits whole.
The idyllic image above, from a watercolor by John Webber, is an engraving from the 1782 edition of Cook's Voyages. From the time of Cook's anchorage in the cove until the morning of March 24, 1989, the landscape was unchanged, the beach pristine.
Then a drunken Captain Joe Hazelwood gave the wrong order to the wheel watch on his supertanker loaded with North Slope crude, his ship grounded on nearby Bligh Reef, and the beach was coated with tar-like crude, and dead birds, fish, and animals.
I visited this cove in 1974, when I spent a day flying around the Sound with the pilot/owner of one of the local floatplane flying services. We stopped at the cove to drop off some engine parts to a fishing boat anchored there, and I was shocked at how accurate Webber's illustration was --- the view was the same as in the engraving.
I have not been back to the Sound since the spill because I know that my anger at the desecration will spoil my enjoyment of the scenery, and that my anger will only increase if I dig six inches down in the beach gravel and encounter the crude oil that's still there, slowly leaching into the water column and poisoning the ecosystem twenty years later.
My anger was only renewed last winter as the Bush Supreme Court refused to punish Exxon for its corporate failures: allowing a drunk to skipper a ship, not being prepared to clean up the inevitable spill, total mismanagement of containment and cleanup efforts, and failure to adequately compensate for the damage the corporation caused. Twenty years after the spill, many of the plaintiffs have still not received their settlement checks.
In 1989, my sister, who with her then-husband worked in the Sound using their halibut trawler as a "packer boat", carrying fish from the fishing grounds to packing plants in Seward, started a chain letter campaign to send Exxon oiled fish. She asked recipients to take an old bait herring, put it in a plastic bag with some old waste oil, and send it to Exxon headquarters in Houston. Exxon received thousands of oiled fish in the mail.
I don't want to go to that length, but I do want to remind folks all over the country about Exxon's crime, and the fact that the damage from the spill continues. The best way to do that is to wear a black arm band on Tuesday and explain to the folks that ask about it that twenty years later, we still mourn the loss of Prince William Sound.
On edit: Corrected Joe HazelWOOD's name. Sorry, I have some kind of anger-driven blind spot on the guy's face and name. His recent "apology" hasn't changed that.