Black Waves

It’s not just beaches and birds.

VALDEZ, Alaska — The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals–all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound.

There are others whom almost no one talks about, although unlike the birds, most of them are still alive. They are the people who scraped oil off the beaches, skimmed it off the top of the water, hosed it off rocks. Workers who stood in the brown foam 18 hours a day, who came back to their sleeping barges with oil matted in their hair, ate sandwiches speckled with oil, steered boats through a brown hydrocarbon haze that looked like the smog from hell.

After that summer, some found oil traces in their lungs, in their blood cells, in the fatty tissue of their buttocks. They got treated for headaches, nausea, chemical burns and breathing problems, and went home. But some never got well. Steve Cruikshank of Wasilla, Alaska, has headaches that go on for days. Two years ago, he was hospitalized when his lungs nearly stopped working. “The doctor said, ‘I’m going to give you the strongest antibiotic known to man, and you’re either going to survive or not survive. I don’t know what’s wrong with you.’ What’s wrong is, I haven’t felt right since that oil spill.”
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From The Black Wave:

The legacy of the Exxon Valdez

Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, marine biologist Riki Ott and the fishers in the town of Cordova, Alaska remind us that the biggest environmental catastrophe in North American history is still with us. …. Toward the end of their judicial saga, Riki Ott and the fishers of Cordova ask if corporate values have trumped human rights and community values in the United States today.

Is there any question about this any more?

“Stick Your Damn Hand In It!” the man said.

The reporters looked, but didn’t see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke. And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous “bathtub ring” that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level.

The real clean-up needs to happen in the courts and corporate boardrooms. How many more ‘big ones’ can we endure?