Oil Spills are Forever
News: From San Francisco to South Korea, petroleum disasters are striking with increasing frequency. And those blackened birds are just the beginning of the bad news.
December 19, 2007
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In the six weeks since the Cosco Busan, a Korea-bound container ship, crashed into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, residents have been subjected to a dismal spectacle: coverall-clad rescue workers, set incongruously against the Bay's photogenic vistas, scooping up dead and dying seabirds. As is the case with most oil spills (including the trifecta of recent spills in South Korea, the Black Sea, and the North Sea), birds have been the most conspicuous victims of the Cosco Busan debacle. The official avian death count stands at over 2,400. But biologists think that's probably just the beginning.
In the traditional way of looking at oil spills, the harm assessment is based on what ecologists refer to as the acute mortality phase—in the Bay's case, all those blackened surf scooters and grebes. But in recent years, researchers have found that oil lingers much longer than previously thought and that it continues to harm wildlife for decades. In the wake of the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, scientists have traced much of the trouble to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, an especially persistent family of chemicals found in oil that can cause deformities, slower growth, and poorer reproduction in many birds and animals.
For the past 18 years, Riki Ott has immersed herself in that science, as well as the politics and sociology of the Valdez spill—an obsession both personal and professional. Trained as a marine toxicologist, Ott was working as, in her words, a "commercial fisherma'am" in the village of Cordova when the Valdez ran into Bligh's Reef. She gave up fishing a few years later when the salmon runs collapsed, but remained in Cordova, a town torn asunder by the spill, and found herself turning into a community organizer and activist; she's also written two books on the spill and its aftermath.
In terms of sheer magnitude, of course, the Bay spill (58,000 gallons of bunker fuel) doesn't compare to Valdez (at least 11 million gallons of North Slope crude). Fishing is once again permitted in the Bay, and rescue operations have slowed. The litigation, of course, will go on for years, as will efforts to assess the full damage from the spill. That's why, Ott told me, the lessons of the Valdez are worth keeping in mind, beginning with the biggest: Oil spills are a lot nastier than you probably realize.
Mother Jones: It's been nearly two decades since the Valdez spill. What's the state of the recovery?
RO: It's been uneven. The areas that were hit hardest are taking longer to recover. It seems that wildlife that share the beach for some part of their life cycle are taking longer to recover. That makes sense with what the independent scientists—the non-industry-funded scientists—are finding. They're all finding traces of PAHs on the beaches, so it's still being transferred into various species.
There are examples of wildlife species that took a hit during the spill that, because of their slow reproductive rate, haven't recovered their numbers. Orca whales and harbor seals, to name two. Then there are species like the Pacific herring, which aren't showing <1>any
sign of recovery. They completely crashed four years after the spill and basically never came back. Right now, we have fewer than 20,000 tons of herring [in Prince William Sound]. Before the spill, we had 120,000 tons. Well, subsequent tests have shown that PAHs suppress the immune system of herring.
MJ: That's interesting in light of the fact that the herring spawn in the San Francisco Bay in December. Do you think the spill will have an impact?
RO: That should be a concern because herring eggs have been found to be one of the most sensitive life phases of any species [in the ocean]. They are sensitive to levels of oil at 400 parts per trillion. That kills herring eggs! And that's a level we couldn't have even measured 30 years ago. We couldn't get below 20 parts per billion.
MJ: Does anyone have a good handle on the extent of the damage to the marine life in Prince William Sound?
RO: I think there is a lot of guess work going on. In December 2003, Science published an article for which the ecologists got together with the chemists and the fish biologists and marine-mammal biologists. They all held these puzzle pieces together and they pieced together a new paradigm [for understanding oil spills]. Now we have a mechanism to explain why oil is so toxic. People used to focus just on the volatile organic carbons. Now we can measure PAHs. We know PAHs get inside the cell of bodies where they can jam synthesis of hormones and jam synthesis of proteins. We know they cause cancer and respiratory problems. We know they suppress immune systems. So it makes individual animals less fit, less able to compete, and they don't survive. That's what we're seeing in Prince William Sound—simply less wildlife.
MJ: You have described oil as the DDT of the 21st century. Can you elaborate?
RO: In 1999, the Environmental Protection Agency listed 22 of the PAHs that are found in crude oil and in car exhaust on the Persistent Bioaccumulative Toxic Pollutant List. There are only a handful of chemicals on that list. At the time, it was just PCBs, DDT, lead, dioxide, mercury, and then these 22 PAHs. We don't put any of that other stuff in the gas tanks of our automobiles. We used to put lead in. Then there was a 65-year battle between the oil industry and health advocates to get it out. That's because lead makes life less able to compete, less able to survive. So that's what we're looking at now with PAHs. They are a lot more toxic than we thought. This is another reason to get off oil. You have to ask, "Why are we poisoning our selves?" I think this is a much more immediate problem than climate change.
MJ: The Cosco Busan spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel. Why is bunker fuel considered so hazardous?
RO: It's nasty stuff because it concentrates all those PAHs. The advantage with spilling crude oil—and there is one advantage—is that it does have some light ends that evaporate or that you can burn off. With bunker fuel, it's pretty much a lost cause once the spill hits the water.
MJ: In the Bay Area, there is a lot of worry that the spill could cause permanent damage, especially in wetlands. What happens when oil makes its way into a wetland?
RO: It slowly breaks down. I emphasize slowly. In Prince William Sound, they're saying that it will be another 40 years for the oil to be taken off by natural means. There are some scientists at Woods Hole who are studying a spill from 1968. They're still finding fingerprints of that oil—a signal of that oil—in the animals.
California is warmer than Alaska, so it will break down a little faster. But these PAHs are very complex molecules. Bacteria can't eat them that fast. So they'll remain in the food web. They'll get transferred into the shellfish, the clams, and the mussels, which act like little sponges, and then get passed along to anything that eats those.
MJ: Are there still cleanup operations at Prince William Sound?
RO: No, there are not. But that raises an interesting issue. Last year, the State of Alaska and the U.S. Department of Justice wrote the court and asked for another $92 million to mitigate unanticipated damages, mostly from the oil that's still on the beaches. We didn't expect the oil to be there that long, or we expected it to become what Exxon called "environmentally benign," where it would morph into some asphalt-like substance that would no longer be bio-available. That's not what happened. It's still there. It's still toxic. It's still being picked up by wildlife. I go out on the beaches every year. You only have to dig six inches down, and up comes the oil. Then the tide comes and you have a sheen.
MJ: You were a commercial fisherwoman before the Valdez spill. Why did you get out of that line of work, and what is the state of commercial fishing in Cordova these days?
RO: I got into commercial fishing because I wanted to take a summer off after 13 years of getting my master's and doctorate in marine toxicology. So I went up to Prince William Sound, fell in love with the area, and bought into the commercial fishery. I fished salmon drift gill net from 1985 until the second fish run collapse in '93.
The pink salmon crashed in '92 and '93. Herring collapsed in '93. In the case of pink salmon, the survivors could not reproduce. In the case of herring, the immune systems failed and crashed the population. After that, I figured I better dust off my academic degrees and see what I could do to help. So I retired from commercial fishing and subsequently started three nonprofit organizations to deal with lingering economic, social, and environmental harm.
MJ: What doesn't the public understand about oil spills?
RO: The public doesn't understand what happens in an oil spill or a class-action lawsuit. They have no idea about the beating they'll get in court. I spent 13 years of my life studying oil spills. I thought I knew about them. But I didn't know how much oil spill hurt, how much they hurt people who live in a community that's affected.
In our case, everyone knew that our main income was linked to commercial fishing and commercial fishing was linked to the health of Prince William Sound. We went down like a house of cards. You take away the fishery, there's nothing left. People knew it and they just despaired. People were despairing on the street. The care providers, the policemen, they all knew it. We burned through six mental-health directors in five years in Cordova. We had a mayor commit suicide.
We were dealing with trauma, and all the ways that manifests—substance abuse, domestic violence, fighting. It was a cauldron. It was like being in a military unit, and the whole unit goes down at the same time. Who's going to pick up the pieces? We were totally unprepared for how much mental havoc it created.
But we got over the trauma from the oil spill. The fish crashed. That was our worst nightmare and we lived through it. Pink salmon recovered. Herring did not. At least the uncertainty was over. But what happened is the litigation dragged on for 18 years. Cordova is now the longest-running study of disaster trauma anywhere in the world. The sociologists discovered that we were experiencing litigation trauma. They had to make up a new word to describe what was happening, "recreancy." It's where people lose faith in the entities that were entrusted to protect the public good. Recreancy ran rampant after the oil spill.
MJ: You've been highly critical of the legal system. What's a better way?
RO: Instead of this adversarial litigation that drags on for decades, where the playing field is tipped to the advantage of corporations, we should have alternative dispute resolution. The governor of California should negotiate a global settlement, for public and private damages, so that people don't end up for two decades in court. It's not worth it. Besides, maritime law is so archaic, it only counts fishermen and oil company property. In Cordova, there were a lot of businesses associated with the fishing industry that were injured. We were all injured. But all our claims didn't count in court.
MJ: There have been a lot of criticisms about the handling of the Bay spill, especially in terms of delays. What did you make of the response?
RO: I saw some things that were chillingly similar to what happened in Prince William Sound. You've got the Coast Guard messing up the blood sample, which they also messed up at Valdez. What is up with that? It's got to be one of the simplest tests to take, for God's sake.
I really don't know why it takes people so long to mobilize [for a cleanup] but it does. On paper you can have all great plans but if you don't drill them, somehow you'll get caught with your pants down. It looks like that happened, that same paralysis that we had up here in Alaska, the inability to leap into action.
That's a critical time, at the beginning. You win or lose pretty much right away, certainly in the first 24 hours. It was lost here, and it looks you lost it down there. Once the oil gets to shore, you might as well go back to throwing hay and straw on oil to clean it up.
MJ: Why is cleanup so difficult?
RO: The oil industry just hasn't invested the dollars into cleanup technology. They can get oil from miles under the earth's mantle and miles under the ocean, but they can't get it once it hits a beach. To me that's a big problem. Government should insist that industry develop something that works because we just don't have anything that does.
MJ: In light of the Bay spill, what would you like to see the government do?
RO: Well, I'd like to see another hard look at the risk-benefit analysis of oil as a future energy source. We know it's more toxic than we thought, that the stuff we're using in automobiles is shaving years off our lives. If you live within 300 feet of a freeway, you're shaving years off your life. Oil is toxic. It's killing us now, and it's doing it in subtle ways. We are less fit and less healthy. Do we really want to rely on this energy source? It gives us spills. It's toxic, both short term and long term. And we end up fighting wars over it. Come on, maybe it's time we looked at this stuff more honestly.
Riki Ott's next book, Not One Drop: Promises, Betrayal, and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill is due out from Chelsea Green Publishing in 2008.
Mike Mosedale, a longtime staff writer for City Pages in Minneapolis, is now a freelance writer living in San Francisco.
