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ALASKA! |
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March 24, 2004 Fifteen years ago, I was shoveling six feet of snow off my sail boat, parked beside the Conex at my little 18 foot travel trailer ten miles from the Alyeska Marine Terminal Facility on Port Valdez. We'd had 50 feet of snow that winter - there was still plenty to go around. On the morning of March 24, 1989, I woke to the clock radio to hear the announcer at KCHU-AM say, "The tanker Exxon Valdez is on the rocks at Bligh Reef and leaking oil." I hopped on my bike, road into town and got my video equipment. I worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week from March 24 until after September 15, documenting the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. It was pretty bewildering that morning, as I'd spent the previous evening in a meeting of the Valdez Mayor's Ad-Hoc Committee on the Effects of Oil Development on Valdez, where I was chair of the Environmental Subcommittee. At 10:30 pm, Rikki Ott, on a teleconference link from Cordova had said, "It's not a matter of if there will be a major oil spill in Prince William Sound, but when." At the moment she spoke those words, Capt. Joe Hazelwood was leaving the Pipeline Club after an evening of drinking with his buddies, heading for the Exxon Valdez, moored at the Terminal Facility. As he left the bar, he passed a calendar by the door that had a picture of the Exxon Valdez as the featured ship for March, with the cheery slogan, "Take time for safety." It wasn't Hazelwood's drinking that caused the Exxon Valdez to pile on the well marked rocks at Bligh Reef. State and federal agencies had been bowing under Exxon pressure for many years to reduce regulations governing tanker traffic in Prince William Sound. The US Coast Guard radar facility at Potato Point had been cut back so severely that it could no longer see the ships as they passed Bligh Reef. The coastal pilot got off before Bligh Reef, instead of staying aboard until the ship cleared Hinchenbrook Entrance, as required by state and federal regulations. The First Mate took control of the ship in waters he was not qualified to navigate. Oil spill response equipment, required by law, was buried under ten feet of snow on the dock, instead of on the barge where it was supposed to be kept, and the only fork lift operator among the oil spill response team was on vacation. Oil spill response equipment did not arrive on the scene of the spill until fourteen hours after the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. When I arrived on the scene at first light, oil was shooting up six feet out of the water along the hull of the Exxon Valdez. We wallowed on a pool of oil eight feet thick; the head in the lower hull pumped oil into the bowl. Aromatic hydrocarbons: benzene, ethylene, toluene and xylene, produced a heady vapor that had me dizzy in moments and precipitated a chronic bronchitis that stays with me even today. No amount of oil spill equipment could have contained that spill, especially after the wind rose to seventy knots two days later. Over the next six months I photographed and videotaped hundreds of thousands of dead and dying animals, poisoned by toxic oil, dying of hypothermia as the oil destroyed their natural insulation, lungs clogged with the vapors of North Slope crude. I watched sea otters crawling onto shore at my feet, trying to escape the cloying oil clogging their fur. I saw birds fall face forward into the slick and never rise again above the surface. I watched from helicopters as orcas and humpback whales surfaced and blew in a rainbow sheen. And to make it all worse, I heard Exxon and United States officials repeatedly lie about what was happening in Prince William Sound, and watched, astonished, as national corporate media repeated the lies, verbatim, as stenographers to power. Nothing sufficient can be done now to condemn the atrocity that was unleashed on Prince William Sound fifteen years ago, by Exxon, the State of Alaska and the United States government. I cannot imagine any fate horrible enough to be visited on Frank Iorossi, the corporate toadies of Exxon and the Bush dynasty. Sometimes I wish there really was a Hell so they'd have something warm to rot in. Michael Leona Gulch Pacific Plate April 1, 2001 Ed called Alaska "the last bite on the plate," and he was right in so many ways. Alaska is no longer a frontier, despite its motto. It could be more characterized as the Lost Frontier. Anchorage is a major city of 250,000 urban dwellers. When they gentrified Spenard, they did away with the last vestige of Alaska in Anchorage. But you can drive to Alaska from there. Fairbanks is the closest to a frontier town these days; it's still pretty rough around the edges, totally lacking in socially redeeming values, devoid of any vestige of culture and ugly to boot. The only reason its there is for the military and the university. All the rest is fast food joints, mega-warehouse stores and tourist industry hotels marketing a vision of Alaska that never existed. Those who control the state government hope to squeeze the last drops out of oil, timber and fishing industries, before they pack up their carpetbags and move back to the Lower 48. The Governor and his cohorts in Juneau are pushing as hard as they can to get drilling rigs on the Coastal Plain. To hell with the caribou and the Gwich'in. When it comes to forking the last bites, thems with the long arms gets the crumbs. Though much has been lost, much remains, though much has been lost. Life in the villages continues on in an amalgam of old and new. Flush toilets share space with seal hides drying on the wall, satellite dish frameworks support polar bear hides, and the ribs sticking up out of the snow are snowmachine and four-wheeler parts. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is marketed like a cruise to the Bahamas, tourists flock to princess Tours for an over-managed cruise through the Inside passage, Tlingit elders vie for tourist dollars with the best of the Chamber of Commerce set, and the Ketchikan pulp mill is making pressed board instead of rayon. Life is good. Alaska is gone, if it ever existed. It's been replaced by an Alaska product, a commodity, a resource, a vacation destination. Lots of people still live there, some of them outside the urban centers, some of them in something that resembles a subsistence lifestyle. Folks are different there, compared to here, in a different way than folks are different here. If Alaska is the last bite on the plate, the plate's getting mighty small. But I guess that's good for what's left of Alaska. When the oil baron's all drip dry and every Texan leaves Alaska with an Okie under each arm, Alaska will be a better place. Lobo Place East Mesa |