Detractors called them Frankenfish, though the FDA declared them safe to eat. Alaska’s two senators, Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski, rallied in opposition to the federal approval, and environmental and consumer advocacy groups urged the FDA to conduct a more thorough environmental review. Senate and House bills to halt approval and to require special labeling if the fish make it to market are pending, but not all legislators oppose the idea. Massachusetts representatives Ed Markey, Barney Frank, and James McGovern urged the FDA to allow the process to continue. The USDA even gave AquaBounty nearly $500,000 dollars in funding for the project in late 2011.
Whatever the outcome of the genetically modified lab salmon, it’s worth noting that even Alaska’s “Congressman for Life,” Republican Don Young, a controversial figure who initially blamed the attacks of 9/11 on environmentalists—who, in a Rolling Stone article, he called “a self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots” who “are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans”—vehemently opposes the AquaBounty Frankenfish, which he called “bad policy all around.”
“I eat Alaskan wild salmon, and I support Alaskan wild salmon, and I will not allow these fake fish to affect our healthy stocks,” said Young, rarely the voice of reason.
Bill drives us out to the City Pier and parks amid a flurry of seagulls. The pier overlooks the small boat harbor, with slips for more than 700 boats, most of them the bow-pickers used by gillnetters. Alongside the pier, a half-dozen seafood processors cluster on streets named Seafood Lane, Breakwater Avenue, and Industry Road. The biggest buildings on the waterfront, they hum with activity as fish tenders tie up to their docks to empty their holds and forklifts scuttle like crabs around huge stacks of refrigerated shipping containers. Workers clean, fillet, and package the fish and pump the waste—heads, tails, offal, unwanted chaff—into Orca Inlet, creating piles of fish bits on the seafloor and an enormous, oily gut slick on the surface.
The slick floats in front of the pier like the monster from a 1960s science fiction movie, dark in the center, foamy white edges. Countless seagulls feed on it. The birds crowd the pier too, in such numbers that it’s difficult to see the wood through all the bird shit, the pier like a fecal Pollock.
The EPA recently slapped Trident Seafoods with a $2.5 million fine for nearly 500 Clean Water Act violations at fourteen of its plants, including the one in Cordova. The company agreed to invest upward of $40 million to control the waste it generates and reduce the discharge from four plants and its floating processor in Sitka’s Starrigavan Bay. EPA reports say such waste creates oxygen-depleting deposit zones that kill fish and other marine life by generating toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. Apparently these undersea gut piles are bigger than you might think. EPA estimates put one of them at more than 90 acres in size, about three Yankee Stadiums. The number of fish you have to process to generate that much waste is staggering. The agency expects the measures to reduce the waste generated by Trident, just one of more than 500 processors registered in Alaska, by more than 105 million pounds each year.
As Bill and I stare at the sheen of fish guts, it occurs to me that it represents more than just the by-product of processing. This is the by-product of the Copper River salmon’s fame. These humming plants splattered with bird shit make it possible for fillets from a king salmon caught in the Copper River delta to end up more than 3,000 miles away in the fish counter at my parents’ Massachusetts grocery store. They’re the reason I can buy a Copper River sockeye in Portland for $9.99 a pound, even months after the season has ended. This glistening gut slick surrounded by seagulls is the hidden cost of Alaska salmon, the part of the price that doesn’t make it onto receipts. How successful would the Alaska brand be if it included images like this?
27
Black Friday
Today is Good Friday. I remembered it by not eating any meat. Having kept a little rice for this occasion, which I mixed with a little blubber, I ate it for both breakfast and supper. The natives were wondering if I were sick out of my head.
If you’ve lived in Cordova since the 1960s, you’ve come to fear Good Friday. There was the earthquake in ’64 of course, and twenty-five years later, on Good Friday 1989, the 987-foot supertanker Exxon Valdez plowed into Bligh Reef and dumped at least 11 million gallons of crude oil into the water.
Within a few days, currents and high winds spread the oil to cover more than 1,800 square miles, devastating local economies across Prince William Sound. In Cordova alone, three of the five seafood processing plants closed and the salmon fleet dropped by 70 percent. Chugach Alaska, the regional Native corporation, filed for bankruptcy protection. Alcoholism, suicide, and domestic violence all spiked in affected towns, and a Reuters investigation found that along with the deaths of four people during cleanup response efforts, at least seven suicides traced back to the spill—one of them Robert Van Brocklin, Cordova’s mayor at the time, who worked with many of the people and organizations devastated by the disaster. Van Brocklin specifically mentioned Exxon in the note he left behind.
Others have documented the effects of the spill, but the short version is this: Fish and Game canceled an entire fishing season. More than half a million birds died—including 250 bald eagles, the symbol of America—and the populations of ducks, loons, and cormorants began a decline that lasted for years. The orca population in the sound dropped by nearly two dozen. More than 2,800 sea otters died, along with hundreds of harbor seals. For years to come, salmon and herring egg mortality remained well above normal. Several generations of herring populations exhibited deformities attributed to the spill.
Five days after the Exxon Valdez ran aground, more than 1,300 miles of shoreline—the length of the Atlantic coast from New Jersey to Florida—had been contaminated. Many fishermen volunteered their time and boats to the cleanup effort in hopes of saving some of the fisheries. At their request, Exxon agreed to pay them for their time containing and cleaning up the oil. Suddenly Exxon was paying the fishermen who hated Exxon—and handsomely—which looked to some like paying them off, a feeling compounded by the corporation’s failed attempt to require a confidentiality agreement to prevent them from telling the press what they saw in the sound. Still, many Cordova fishermen earned far more from Exxon than they would have fishing. The money proved only temporary, and it disappeared when the company ended the cleanup efforts, but the results of the spill lingered. Ultimately the marine ecosystem of Prince William Sound and those who depended upon it for a living paid the real cost.
In the aftermath of the spill, Exxon received enormous backlash from Americans who saw images of the oil-soaked birds and otters of Prince William Sound. The company received so many angry calls that it eventually provided its telephone operators with grief counselors. A consumer boycott followed, but if it affected the company at all, the effects were short-lived. Within a decade, Exxon, which merged with Mobil in 1999—both once components of Standard Oil before the Sherman Antitrust Act dissolved it in 1911—was the world’s largest company by revenue and the biggest oil company, with sales 20 percent higher than before the spill.
In Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, journalist Steve Coll writes that in the years leading up to the spill, Exxon cut its workforce overall by 40 percent, including its oil spill team, creating a workplace culture that led to long hours and employee fatigue, a factor cited by those investigating the spill. Though initially jailed for his role in the incident, the captain of the Exxon Valdez, Joseph Hazelwood, was eventually acquitted of every charge but a single misdemeanor Clean Water Act violation, and his captain’s license restored.
A lawsuit went to court, where an Anchorage jury awarded actual damages of $287 million and $5 billion in punitive damages against Exxon. The corporation appealed. A Ninth Circuit judge reduced the punitive damages. Exxon appealed the new figure too. The court eventually settled on a $2.5 billion award in 2006, some s
eventeen years after the spill, but Exxon appealed again. When the court denied that appeal, the company’s lawyers took it to the Supreme Court, which vacated the damage award and limited punitive damages to $507.5 million. For each dollar originally assessed against the company for damages, it paid just a dime. Try to talk a traffic ticket down accordingly and see how far you get.
The cleanup cost was separate from damages, though, and in 1991 Exxon made a deal to pay $900 million over the next decade with a caveat that the government could reopen the case and assess new damages up to $100 million if it found later that problems remained not addressed by the initial efforts. That “reopener” provision had an expiration date, and shortly before it expired in 2006 the state and the Department of Justice filed a claim seeking an additional payment of $92 million. Exxon contested on the grounds that the reopener was limited to “restoration” projects, and that restoration was something different than “cleanup.” That claim remains unpaid.
The company recovered the lion’s share of what it paid in cleanup and punitive damages from insurance claims. In 2008 it reported a single quarter profit of $14.8 billion—$45.2 billion for the year—and in 2011 earned as much as $10.8 billion per quarter. Other years have been similarly profitable. On the twentieth anniversary of the spill in 2009, ExxonMobil released a statement asserting that “there has been no long-term damage caused by the spilled oil,” adding that the “ecosystem in Prince William Sound today is healthy, robust and thriving.”
Today researchers estimate that more than 21,000 gallons of crude oil remain in the Prince William Sound area, stretching as far as 450 miles from the original spill site. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, created by the government to monitor the aftermath, said the oil will “take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely.”
For many in Alaska, the worst part of the Exxon Valdez disaster wasn’t the death of so much wildlife, the lingering damage to beaches and ecosystems, or the loss of livelihoods, but that we didn’t learn our lesson. In a 2011 editorial, Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Natural Resources Dan Sullivan cited polls showing that as much as 78 percent of the Alaska public and “100 percent of our elected officials” support oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
ANWR is just one of the areas being targeted for exploration and drilling in the Arctic now that the sea ice is disappearing so rapidly, opening the waters to maritime passage. Oil companies say the Arctic Ocean may hold as much oil as Venezuela—without the impediment of possible crazy person Hugo Chavez—and as much natural gas as Russia. The Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, where Joe learned his trade, may hold as much as 30 billion barrels of oil, about four years’ worth of American consumption. In 2012 the Coast Guard announced Operation Arctic Shield, a new deployment of cutter patrols and helicopter operations across the Arctic, in response to growing oil company exploration and the increase in traffic in the region—Bering Sea traffic alone nearly doubled from 2009 to 2010.
ExxonMobil announced plans to develop areas of the Point Thomson oil field east of Prudhoe Bay, which holds hundreds of millions of gallons of oil and an estimated 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Shell Oil plans to drill six wells in the Chukchi, and so far the company has been clearing permitting hurdles one by one toward making that plan a reality. It seems likely the drilling will happen sooner or later, but first the company has to build and test a system to cap a well blowout—like the one BP faced in the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico—and conduct extensive spill response drills to test response plans.
A spill in the Arctic would make for a very different spill than those in Prince William Sound or the Gulf. You wouldn’t have the massive community of fishermen to lend boats and labor, you couldn’t get response teams there as quickly, and the cost of shipping people and equipment would be exponentially higher. The dispersants used to thin spilled oil don’t work well at or near freezing temperatures, and the containment booms are useless with so much ice floating around. What happens if the spill isn’t cleaned up or even contained by the time winter hits?
East of the Shell development site in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is another hotly contested piece of real estate believed to contain huge amounts of oil: ANWR’s Coastal Plain, near Kaktovik, where Joe Bernard spent his first Arctic winter in 1909. ANWR lies within 100 miles of Prudhoe Bay, the continent’s largest oil field, and the areas share similar geologic characteristics, leading industry diviners to believe that the Coastal Plain—just 8 percent of ANWR—holds the largest potential pocket of onshore petroleum yet to be explored in North America. Opponents worry about the effects of drilling on the land, the wildlife, and the Native populations who live there. Those who favor drilling claim we’ve learned enough about the practice that we can drill relatively unobtrusively, without decimating the landscape, or anything that calls it home. Besides, they say, ANWR is not Yellowstone—only a few hundred people visit there each year, mostly hunters, rafters, and hikers.
But maybe it comes down to symbolism. Even if the drilling apparatus were perfectly risk-free, and the caribou could migrate around it without bother, doesn’t it change the nature of the land irreparably to have the rigs and the infrastructure and crews to support them in the midst of one of the last remaining wild places on the continent?
In March 2012 the Senate voted against opening ANWR to drilling. Alaska’s Democratic senator, Mark Begich, who replaced the late Ted Stevens, voted in favor. He backs ANWR drilling, and if Commissioner Sullivan is right, so do a lot of Alaskans. When Sarah Palin said “Drill, baby, drill,” her words resonated across the state. A sovereignty battle is taking place. Should Alaska get to decide, or does the rest of the country get a vote? Should the people get to weigh in at all, or does the federal government get to choose the fate of a federally managed refuge without guilt or consequence?
You could hole up for a winter in ANWR now and experience it much as Joe did a century ago. It’s remarkable that a place in America still exists where this remains true, a place that has resisted the century of change that has come to much of the rest of the country.
ANWR is safe from drilling for now, though the path for Shell to begin drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas might be clear as early as this year. In June 2012 the Shell Oil drilling ship Kulluk sat in a shipyard in Seattle, near where the Teddy Bear was built, before it left to join sister rig Noble Discoverer and a Shell fleet of twenty support ships for a trip to the North Slope to poke holes in the floor of the Beaufort Sea. A few weeks later, the Coast Guard detained one of the ships in the fleet, an Arctic containment barge to be positioned over a leaking well or pipeline in the event of a spill, declaring it not fit for rough weather. The next month, the Noble Discovery dragged anchor in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, and appears to have drifted ashore. While no damage or pollution was reported, the grounding raised eyebrows and questions over the company’s ability to prevent accidents during the extremely complex process of undersea drilling if it can’t even sail to the Arctic without incident.
The 2012 election will have gone a long way toward determining the future of drilling in the Arctic. The newest chair of the House Science and Technology Committee, eighty-seven-year-old congressman Ralph Hall, R-Texas, is a big fan of oil drilling and wholeheartedly supports the idea of exploring ANWR. Hall found the massive BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico inspiring. “As we saw that thing bubbling out, blossoming out—all that energy, every minute of every hour of every day of every week—that was tremendous to me that we could deliver that kind of energy out there, even on an explosion,” he told the Dallas News, missing the point.
Maybe ANWR will be the next major American drilling site. It’s difficult to predict. Change is inevitable—last year the Exxon Valdez reached the Indian port of Alang to be junked for metal, her scrap expected to fetch $16 million at market. But not everything changes, and some history repeats itself despite our best eff
orts. In 2009 a tugboat captain slammed into Bligh Reef—the same reef hit two decades earlier by the Exxon Valdez—tearing his fuel tanks and pouring about 6,400 gallons of fuel into Prince William Sound. At the time of the accident, he was checking e-mail and playing a game of Hearts on his computer.
28
Captain Bernard
He says there is a man wintering at Coronation Gulf in a schooner about twice the size of the Teddy Bear. He calls him ‘Pytok.’ From his description of the man I think this must be my uncle Peter Bernard. ‘Pytok’ would be about the way the natives would pronounce Peter in their dialect.
Forty years after Joe’s death, a Captain Bernard still sails out of Cordova. Most of the year, Bob lives with his wife and dog in a quiet suburb of Portland, Oregon, an Alaskan expat, and aside from a few nautical-themed objects in his yard, you might not know that each spring he returns to his element as a hard-swearing deck boss who rules his crew from the bridge of his commercial fish tender, Alaskan Pacific. We meet for the first time at his home and spend the better part of a day getting to know each other. He’s got more hair than his brother Bill. He’s built differently too—more wiry, with the face of a man who has weathered the years. He’d look right at home in any of the photos from the Bernards’ expeditions to the Arctic.
He greets me warmly and treats me like family, which I am, however distant. Like Bill, he’s excited that someone finally is going to tell a little bit of the story of Captain Joseph Bernard and the schooner Teddy Bear—doubly thrilled it’s another Bernard. For years now, the brothers have done what they can to maintain “Uncle Joe’s” legacy, each in his own way. For Bill that means living on his uncle’s lot on Odiak Slough, keeping his mementos on display in the basement apartment, getting his mail in the same PO box his great-uncle kept for his entire fifty-year tenure in Cordova. He occasionally maintains a blog about Joe’s adventures in the Teddy Bear, has worked with the local historical museum on an exhibit dedicated to Joe’s explorations, and provided me with more material from Joe’s collections and his own memories than I even asked for. For Bob it means continuing to research the accomplishments of Joe and Peter Bernard. He’s become something of an expert on that period of Arctic exploration, and cardboard boxes filled with correspondence, research, photographs, and artifacts lie strewn about his home.
Chasing Alaska: A Portrait of the Last Frontier Then and Now Page 23
