| Foreword |
|
12 | (2) |
|
|
| People Mentioned Frequently in the Interviews |
|
14 | (1) |
| Glossary |
|
15 | (2) |
| Timeline |
|
17 | (2) |
| Introduction |
|
19 | (49) |
|
|
|
66 | (2) |
| Photos |
|
68 | |
|
|
|
21 | (32) |
|
|
|
26 | (2) |
|
|
|
"As the oil came to the surface it made a gurgling noise, and big bloops would leap right out of the water two to four feet" |
|
|
28 | (4) |
|
|
|
"The tanker was grinding something fierce. It sounded like a train. Our greatest fear was that it was going to break apart" |
|
|
32 | (4) |
|
|
|
"It was certainly the most difficult thing I've ever done, as far as my professional career goes" |
|
|
36 | (4) |
|
|
|
"There was no effort whatsoever being made to clean up" |
|
|
40 | (4) |
|
|
|
"While the ship was at Naked Island, she had no bottom. She was literally floating on a bubble" |
|
|
44 | (3) |
|
|
|
"`Serious as a heart attack'" |
|
|
47 | (2) |
|
|
|
"The regulators, I believe, came to see it as their mission to befriend and protect the industry rather than force it to spend money to be safer" |
|
|
49 | (4) |
|
|
|
|
|
53 | (143) |
|
"The window of opportunity was in the first forty-eight hours, and for the first forty-eight hours we at Alyeska were trying to figure out what the hell to do" |
|
|
58 | (3) |
|
|
|
"That auditorium was absolutely electric. There was so much fear and anger, you could hear it crackling through the audience" |
|
|
61 | (31) |
|
|
|
"I really didn't want to tell people how hopeless it was, as far as getting the oil off the water anytime soon. I tried to be as honest as I could because we had to keep looking at the positive side" |
|
|
92 | (4) |
|
|
|
"Frank Iarossi was ... having a press conference. I'll never forget walking into that situation, standing against a wall while someone dressed as the Easter bunny tried to ask questions of him. It was very surreal" |
|
|
96 | (4) |
|
|
|
"I realized that, for two whole hours, I had not seen one bird, one otter, one seal, or any other living creature. It was like there had been a nuclear attack, with cities still standing but not a living soul to be seen. Something broke inside of me then" |
|
|
100 | (3) |
|
|
|
"In my job, I've seen a lot of destruction, but I had never seen anything quite like that of the Exxon Valdez" |
|
|
103 | (3) |
|
|
|
"Some pretty important people said ... we might be better off doing nothing and letting Mother Nature take care of it. But doing nothing wasn't an option, ever. We had to do something, even if it was just looking busy" |
|
|
106 | (5) |
|
|
|
"They had us form a special detachment for the good-looking girls. ... We assigned them the easiest jobs so they'd be able to party in the evenings" |
|
|
111 | (3) |
|
|
|
"As much as Alaska is a place, it is an idea, and that idea was damaged" |
|
|
114 | (4) |
|
|
|
"Exxon had done the old bait-and-switch trick.... Their `before' pictures were of one beach and their `after' pictures were of another beach" |
|
|
118 | (6) |
|
|
|
"Ted Stevens said, `None of us could get elected if the election was this morning in Alaska. None of us. This is a big thing, Mr. President.'" |
|
|
124 | (5) |
|
|
|
"All these bigwigs came in, they didn't understand the local protocol, and they were mucking up the works" |
|
|
129 | (3) |
|
|
|
"Our civilization had no concept of the scale of our actions. Correspondingly, we had no notion of our ability to destroy and our inability to fix it" |
|
|
132 | (4) |
|
|
|
"That was when I realized that their goal was not to pick up the oil. They just wanted to cover it up and say it was clean and hope that the winter storms would wash it away" |
|
|
136 | (4) |
|
|
|
"Everyone was trying to do the best they could, but basically we were all a bunch of failures, from the equipment to the boat handlers to our many leaders" |
|
|
140 | (4) |
|
|
|
"It was a terrible scene, one to rival anyone's idea of hell. We cried a lot. At least once or twice a day, you had to just sit down and weep" |
|
|
144 | (4) |
|
|
|
"Very quickly we started getting calls from people all over the country and all over the world. These were folks who wanted to come and witness the devastation and have an impact in some way" |
|
|
148 | (4) |
|
|
|
"For the first time in memory, people had to start locking their cars, because you'd get up in the morning and there would be two or three people sleeping in your car" |
|
|
152 | (4) |
|
|
|
"There was a seal that had been screaming for hours, trying to get on her boat, trying to get out of the oil. The sound of a seal's scream is exactly like that of a baby's, and it kept hitting the side of her hull, trying to climb on board" |
|
|
156 | (4) |
|
|
|
"I felt like I was speaking for the environment, for the birds, the herring, the whales. That is what drove me. Somebody had to speak for those critters" |
|
|
160 | (4) |
|
|
|
Cordova "We swooped down to get a better look and instantly got into a cloud of hydrocarbons. We all started feeling nauseous. Steve banked the plane, and we flew up into clean air" |
|
|
164 | (4) |
|
|
|
"We used to go out almost every weekend, even if it was raining. We'd go out and picnic, take the canoe and have a day. We don't do that anymore. ... The spirit of the water has changed" |
|
|
168 | (3) |
|
|
|
"Exxon had bought a lot of Inipol. ... We said, `So you're going to spray all this stuff, which we know is cancer-causing, all over the beaches and all over the oyster beds and everything else that's in the nearshore area and we're not supposed to be worried about that?' We wouldn't let them do it" |
|
|
171 | (4) |
|
|
|
"It was anarchy, the good kind of anarchy, with no institution directing it, just people coming together to figure it out" |
|
|
175 | (3) |
|
|
|
"I'd been working in the oil industry for the previous ten years. ... To have to witness the death of the environment, the death of the water, by the hands of work that I had done myself, was emotionally devastating to me" |
|
|
178 | (4) |
|
|
|
"When you have a disaster like the Exxon Valdez, it goes beyond money. You can't repair emotions and you can't repair the loss of an ecosystem" |
|
|
182 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The big lesson we learned is, do everything you can to prevent oil spills, but they are going to happen again, so be prepared for it" |
|
|
185 | (3) |
|
|
|
"No one and no thing was going to stop me from cleaning up that spill. Whatever I had to do, I was going to make sure that somebody was paying attention to that island" |
|
|
188 | (3) |
|
|
|
"There wasn't enough equipment, and ... there was nothing said about needing more equipment. There was no state or federal law mandating Alyeska to have more equipment. It just never came up" |
|
|
191 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The oil industry dumped every last vestige of trying to do the right job on oil spill response" |
|
|
194 | (2) |
|
|
|
|
|
196 | (87) |
|
"It was deathly silent. All you could hear was the lapping of oil on the rocks of the beach with the wave action. It gave all of us a sense of death on a big scale" |
|
|
200 | (3) |
|
|
|
"We began to realize that, yes, the animals were gone. And they've never come back. We didn't find the bodies. Unfortunately, killer whales sink most of the time" |
|
|
203 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The fishermen of Cordova had a lot of fear around the construction of a pipeline across Alaska to Prince William Sound. It turns out they were right. Fishermen know boats and they know that people in boats can and do make mistakes" |
|
|
206 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The majority of our respondents believe that the Sound's ecosystem will not recover within their lifetime. For many, the only way the Exxon Valdez disaster will end is when they die" |
|
|
209 | (4) |
|
|
|
"They thought I might be a security risk. I felt that, `If you think I am a security risk, then perhaps I am one,' and I worked in that manner" |
|
|
213 | (3) |
|
|
|
Executive director, Cordova District Fishermen United --- "There were fishermen who were able to get contracts, there were fishermen who didn't want to get contracts because they didn't want to work for Exxon, and there were fishermen who wanted to work for Exxon but couldn't get a contract. So it created a lot of animosity between people, and that's a hard thing in a community the size of Cordova" |
|
|
216 | (4) |
|
|
|
"I just hope to God another oil spill never happens here or any other place again" |
|
|
220 | (2) |
|
|
|
|
|
"I left the town that I love, my business, my friends. But my angst was so huge that, if I had stayed, I don't think I would have lived" |
|
|
222 | (4) |
|
|
|
"When Exxon said they would make us whole, they ended up putting a hole in us, a hole in our hearts" |
|
|
226 | (3) |
|
|
|
"I was in a deep hole. I felt like I was worthless. Without counseling I might have taken my life" |
|
|
229 | (3) |
|
|
|
"For the most part, the town `fathers' were out on boats, and an amazing set of women ran the meetings at home" |
|
|
232 | (3) |
|
|
|
"Dealing with Exxon taught me a lot about negotiating and the pure seductive nature of money---immense money---and the global reach that the oil industry possesses. Their power is almost unfathomable" |
|
|
235 | (3) |
|
|
|
"We had to get to the beach early in the morning before the eagles did because, if they found anything oily that had washed up or crawled up overnight, they were on it fast" |
|
|
238 | (4) |
|
|
|
"The spill began creating rifts between people because whoever worked on the cleanup became rich practically overnight. ... Some people made a lot of money and some people didn't make any. It just depended on how you felt about working for Veco and Exxon" |
|
|
242 | (3) |
|
|
|
"You can't come to a land, extract their resources, gain enormous benefits, and not protect the people on whose land you've encroached" |
|
|
245 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The oil industry has the right to develop the oil fields and they have a right to transport the oil. But I don't think they have the right to destroy people's lives and livelihood, and that's what happened in 1989" |
|
|
248 | (2) |
|
|
|
"It was hard to get our point across a lot of times to people from Houston who worked for Exxon. They just really didn't understand Alaska, and they didn't understand small town life, so they certainly couldn't understand village life, or Native subsistence life" |
|
|
250 | (3) |
|
|
|
"We did take the kids to certain beaches, looking for fun stuff, pretty rocks or glass balls. To our horror, we'd see bear carcasses and deer carcasses and whales, covered in oil and starved to death" |
|
|
253 | (3) |
|
|
|
"I went down on the beach and looked around, and the mussels had all died. I'd touch them and they'd fall off the rocks" |
|
|
256 | (2) |
|
|
|
"I used to say, `Exxon is going to pay us. We'll get paid, we'll get paid....' After all this time, I'll believe it when I see it" |
|
|
258 | (2) |
|
|
|
"Our salmon season had to be scratched. We couldn't risk getting any tainted salmon out on the market. Imagine opening up a can of salmon and having it smell like oil" |
|
|
260 | (3) |
|
|
|
"A couple of times, at the public meetings where Exxon kept telling everybody how wonderful things were going, police officers had to be called in because we had some people who were pretty upset" |
|
|
263 | (3) |
|
|
|
"The fishermen were being manipulated into being opportunists, which drastically changed their lifestyle. There was all this jealousy over who made their million dollars off a Veco contract while other people didn't" |
|
|
266 | (3) |
|
|
|
"My daughter was four years old at the time.... I'll never forget hearing her mutter into her cornflakes, `I hate Exxon.'" |
|
|
269 | (3) |
|
|
|
"I made the decision that, if need be---if ultimately I was ordered to---I would go to jail rather than expose my respondents. Exxon was not getting our confidential data" |
|
|
272 | (4) |
|
|
|
"We need to clean the oil, get it out of our water, bring death back to life. We are intoxicated with desperation" |
|
|
276 | (3) |
|
|
|
"I would like to offer an apology, a very heartfelt apology, to the people of Alaska" |
|
|
279 | (4) |
|
|
| Interviewee Photo Credits |
|
283 | (1) |
| Index |
|
284 | (3) |
| Acknowledgments |
|
287 | (1) |
| Authors' Note |
|
287 | (1) |
| About the Authors |
|
288 | |
Las personas que visitaron este libro, también visitaron los siguientes libros.
que aparece a la derecha.