Exxon Spill: How Clean Is Clean?

In Alaska’s Prince William Sound, workers steam-gunned a rocky beach, pushing oil into the receding tide. Every day, in 12-hour shifts, nearly 100 men and women rinsed oil from rocks. The muck slid into the sea, and was held from open water by an arc of boom. The crew had to work fast down the shore, so that a skimming machine could suck up the oily residue before high tide carried it back. The workers had been over the beach three times in late May, removing about five barrels of oil during one shift alone, and still they weren’t done.

Financing an arsenal of more than 8,000 people supported by U.S. military ships and planes, Exxon plans to use this and similar methods to attack about 300 miles of tainted sound by Sept. 15.

As of June 1, only one mile of beach had been certified “clean” by the U.S. Coast Guard, said a Coast Guard spokesman. He said “clean” means “all oil that could be removed without changing topography of the island had been removed.”

But as our team observed, “clean” is a relative term.

Although rocks on that mile of beach may no longer glisten with oil, they are still spotted with it. As our team saw, such tiny shelled creatures as limpets, which usually cling to the undersides of stones, were dead or dying. A black swath of oily residue spread across the upper beach. Above the beach, among the boulders, there was still raw crude oil, where indeed only a bulldozer could reach.

This “clean” section of beach may represent the best oil-spill muscle and machinery that can be marshaled in the United States, and perhaps the world. But clean is more than a matter of what one sees.

Underwater, Prince William Sound appeared relatively clean, but oil may have mixed with bottom sediment. In a limited series of dives, our team saw no sunken oil. Yet we know that oil can cling to silt and microscopic animals that thrive in the marine environment, the planktonic food of fish, crab and shrimp, which in turn become food for birds, otters and seals. Oil contamination invisible to the eye may leave effects behind for many years, effects that will be difficult to measure.

Coagulated With Oil

Even though we saw no seals on or near the “clean” beach, we saw many seals in waters off Knight Island. Most had coats so stiff with coagulated oil they looked as if they had been tarred. Even relatively “clean” seals may suffer nervous system and internal organ damage, blindness, pneumonia and other chronic problems that could lead to death, all from simply breathing the toxic fumes of oil.

At the start of the seal pupping season in mid-May, Alaska state marine biologists found two pups dead in the oily shallow waters of a small bay. Scientists said the pups had been born alive, suggesting they were healthy pups entering an unhealthy environment. “We will never see all the dead ones, considering how much area is involved,” one of the scientists remarked.

Seals can re-oil themselves each time they come in and out of the water, or as they slide on oil-soaked seaweed covering rocks. Whether the seals can successfully molt their stiffened fur remains to be seen later this summer.

Although the formidable cleanup plan took seal pupping and other seasonal factors into account, it is precisely the magnitude and complexity of the clean-up that is frightening.

How often will we be willing or able to repeat such an undertaking?

As of June 1, cleanup costs for the Prince William Sound accident exceeded $115 million, a variety of commercial fisheries had been closed and 22,000 seabirds, 732 otters, various raptors and other animals were known dead. And this is only a percentage of the total number believed killed by the oil spill.

The original source of the oil, Prudhoe Bay, will be “played out by the turn of the century,” Exxon Chairman Lawrence Rawl said in a recent interview. Thus, the Alaska pipeline finished in 1977 will have delivered oil for only about 25 years. During this bought time, little advance has been made in finding safer, more efficient forms of energy. U.S. automobiles are not even required to attain 30 miles per gallon of gasoline. In other words, Prince William Sound has seen great sacrifice for little progress in alternatives to oil.

Risky Business

Of course, we could drill for more oil in the untouched Arctic, and risk another accident. Or perhaps drill off the shores of pristine Antarctica, where the already-wrecked Argentine tanker Bahia Paraiso remains loaded with 70,000 gallons of oil, its rescue unfinished as an icy winter approaches that could crush the ship like an egg. How could we “clean” such remote seas and terrain?

As for Alaska, the Exxon Valdez oil spill cursed an estimated 700 miles of shoreline overall. Perhaps in years or decades, nature will clean every mile. But nature does not exist to correct our mistakes. That we should correct them ourselves is the warning from imperially beautiful Prince William Sound.