- It was at 7.15am on a cold Alaskan morning on 24 March
1989 that Dr Riki Ott was awoken by a loud banging on her front door. It
sounded urgent. Still in her nightdress, she raced downstairs. "How
long will it take you to get dressed?" asked a distressed colleague.
"Five minutes. Why?" Ott replied. "We've had the big one.
There's a tanker aground on Bligh Reef. It's lost 10 million gallons, but
there's four times that on board."
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- Only the night before, Ott, a marine biologist, had warned
the local mayor's oil action committee about the possibility of a big spill.
"Given the high frequency of tankers into Port Valdez, the increasing
age and size of that tanker fleet, and the inability quickly to contain
and clean up an oil spill in the open water of Alaska, fishermen feel that
we are playing a game of Russian roulette," she said. "Gentleman,
it is not a matter of what if, but when."
-
- Hours later, on a calm, moonlit night, the 1,000ft-long
Exxon Valdez ploughed into reef, a well known hazard in Prince William
Sound. In charge was Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who, it would transpire
later, had lost his driving licence through drink-driving. Having been
drinking that night, he'd left the third mate at the wheel. The collision
tore a car-sized hole in the vessel's side and ruptured eight of the 11
cargo tanks.
-
- Since that day, Ott has tried to uncover the true social,
health and environmental costs of the spill, and has just written a book
exposing the lies and myths surrounding it. The oil spill killed more wildlife
than any in history, but her book also tells of the mounting human cost
of the catastrophe, and the implications for our use of oil.
-
- Ott, 50, grew up in Wisconsin at the height of the scare
over the toxic pesticide DDT. Her father gave her a copy of Rachel Carson's
book Silent Spring, which exposed the problems of DDT and helped to spark
the modern environmental movement. "At 13, I decided to become a marine
biologist, like Carson. At 18, I left to find an ocean." She gained
a doctorate in marine toxicology and became a commercial fisherwoman.
-
- Flying over the Exxon Valdez the morning after, Ott watched
as the vessel spewed millions of gallons of highly toxic oil into the sea.
A bluish haze was rising above the oil. The official estimate of the spill
was 11 million gallons, but years later Ott uncovered a secret report by
the State of Alaska putting the true figure at about 30 million. The slick
spread over 10,000 square miles of Alaska's coastal seas, as far as 1,200
miles away.
-
- The images were a public-relations disaster for Exxon
and other oil companies. Pictures of workers wiping rocks with rags looked
totally inadequate. The numbers killed ranged from thousands of marine
mammals, including otters, seals and orcas, to hundreds of thousands of
sea birds, such as murres and ducks, to millions of fish.
-
- Every oil spill brings untried new ways of trying to
clean up. The unacknowledged truth is that only really effective tactic
is not to spill it in the first place. "They didn't know what to do.
The oil industry collectively is not able to clean up oil once it is spilled
on beaches," Ott says. Still, 11,000 people were hired to clean up
the oil.
-
- Exxon tried an untested method of blasting the rocks
with high-pressure hot-water hoses. This washed the oil away, but with
devastating consequences. As well as wiping out wildlife that had survived
the disaster, the hoses caused chronic health problems for the workers
- and this is the hidden story. They vaporised the oil into a fine mist
that the workers inhaled. This toxic cocktail contained polycyclic aromatic
hydrocarbons, now classified as some of the worst chemicals known to man.
-
- Crude oil was known to be dangerous. A 1988 Exxon Safety
Data Sheet said "High vapour concentrations are irritating to the
eyes and the respiratory tract, may cause headaches and dizziness... may
cause unconsciousness, and may have other central nervous system effects
including death" and added "Minimise breathing vapours. Minimise
skin contact." Fishermen trying to stop the oil spreading soon became
nauseous and dizzy. So did the first workers, who claim they weren't given
protective equipment or warned that the oil fumes could be hazardous to
their health.
-
- Ott argues that Exxon failed to protect workers because
it did not provide protective clothing, adequate training or information
about the risks. Some clean-up crews were told that respirators were "optional",
while others were given respirators that did not work. One study later
found that in a survey group, 70 per cent of clean-up workers were not
given respirators.
-
- Workers started coming down with the "Valdez crud",
a term used by doctors to describe symptoms including headaches, sore throats,
sinus infections and coughs. The problems became so widespread that the
former Alaskan medical doctor for BP warned that clean-up crews should
be "pulled off the beaches to avoid further tragedy in the form of
human suffering, illness and disease".
-
- "They told workers they were safe, and they weren't,"
Ott says. "They put keeping their reputation intact ahead of protecting
people. When people start to get sick you find out why, you get respirators,
you get proper protective gear. That didn't happen... They could have stopped
the high-pressure hosing. When they realised it wasn't working, they could
have stopped it. Exxon killed Alaska while trying to save it."
-
- Ron Smith was one of the workers who headed to the spill
hoping to earn good money. He worked on the boats. He started to get intense
headaches, especially on sunny windless days, where he could watch the
"vapours rising like heat waves". Even after stopping work, the
headaches and mood swings continued. Eventually he went to see doctors
specialising in environmental medicine in Dallas, to be told he had "very
high levels of some pretty dangerous chemicals" in his body. Smith
later settled a personal injury lawsuit against Exxon, and he was subject
to a gag order.
-
- But it was not just oil the workers were exposed to.
Exxon used fertilisers and other industrial chemicals to try to break down
the oil. One of the chemicals used was Inipol. Its Safety Data Sheet warned
that Inipol caused a variety of health effects: dizziness, headaches, blood
and kidney damage, and red discolouration of the urine. Some workers, including
Don Moeller, started peeing blood.
-
- When Moeller heard about the spill, he took time off
from his job to looking mentally handicapped people to work on the beaches,
mopping up. Like many, he had problems with the respirators, which were
"no longer good after a couple of hours".
-
- His ledger for 1 August noted that, after the raingear
he was given fell apart, he worked for two hours with his legs "exposed".
But he was told by Exxon of Inipol that there was "no hazard to us.
Just wear the right gear." He was pulled off the beaches after blood
was found in his urine. Moeller continued to experience chemical sensitivity
problems and night sweats for the next few years. In 2001, he settled a
lawsuit against Exxon and its contractor.
-
- Captain Richard Nagel worked on the clean-up for three
years. In some bays, the oil was six inches thick on the water. "You
couldn't breathe right and your eyes would tear constantly," he recalls.
He was told about Inipol: "This stuff is harmless. You can eat it
and it won't harm you." In the early Nineties, he too started suffering
chronic symptoms - calcium breakdown and blood disorders, seizures, acute
anxiety and severe depression, loss of balance, night sweats, blurred vision
and memory loss. He has been told by his doctors that he is dying.
-
- Ott has been collating information about people who sued
Exxon. "I found Exxon's clinical data, showing that 6,722 workers
reported respiratory distress. That is more than one in two clean-up workers.
That is like an epidemic," she recalls. She argues that Exxon "covered-up
mass chemical poisoning of the clean-up workers".
-
- At the end of their three-year investigation, Ott and
her assistant, Pam Miller, concluded that "there are, unquestionably
and undeniably, people who have died, and people who are suffering from
chronic health problems stemming from wrongful exposure during the clean-up."
-
- It is unlikely that any of these people will be compensated.
Of the cases against Exxon so far, many have been lost, with a small number
being settled for tiny amounts, for a variety of reasons. These included
the difficulty of proving in court that the health problems were due to
the spill, and the fact that Exxon has the financial and legal muscle to
defend any case vigorously, including going to appeal. Exxon argues that
"no cause and effect" between ill health and the spill has been
proven in the 25 cases that have made it to court.
-
- Indeed, Exxon is still contesting the main civil legal
case against the company. In 1994, a judge ordered the company to pay about
$4.5bn in punitive damages, but the case has gone back and forth between
America's Supreme Court and the Alaskan courts. Ott claims that Exxon has
saved billions by delaying paying compensation.
-
- Exxon's spokesman, Tom Cirigliano, dismisses Ott as a
"propagandist" and her book as "nothing new and flaky science".
He argues that Exxon acted "responsibly" and took the spill "very
seriously", pointing out that they "stayed with the clean-up
until the federal government and State of Alaska said it was complete".
He dismisses the health concerns, arguing that Exxon monitored the health
of workers: "Safety was our number one priority during the clean-up
of the spill."
-
- He said: "Certainly, there were respiratory problems,
which are very common when you put large groups of people together in very
small quarters."Asked if any of the respiratory problems were due
to the spill, he said: "No, we don't believe there were any... It
is hard to say. There may be people who had a sensitivity to some of the
materials being used ... There was certainly no increase in the normal
number you would expect who have a sensitivity". He does admit that
hot-water hosing "would probably not" be done today.
-
- Ott says scientific studies have shown that an estimated
50-100 tons of oil remains in Prince William Sound. As it breaks down,
it accumulates in the food chain from mussel beds, clams and whelks to
worms, crabs and fish and then to mammals. Ott contends that oil continues
to harm wildlife 15 years after a spill.
-
- Ott says the Exxon Valdez spill forces us to re-evaluate
our continuing dependence on oil because of the effect it is having on
our health and wildlife. She draws a parallel with lead in petrol: "With
lead, we recognised these problems back in the 1920s, but it took us until
1989 finally to get the lead out of petrol. Now it looks like we need to
take the petrol out of our cars as well."
-
- - 'Sound Truth and Corporate Myths: The Legacy of the
Exxon Valdez Oil Spill' by Riki Ott is published by Dragonfly Sisters Press
(see http://soundtruth.info/)
-
- ©2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/
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