Oil Spill

Easter 1989 Good Friday Alaskans received the news that their pristine playground, Prince William Sound, had been despoiled by (what was then) the largest oil spill in North American history. The Exxon Valdez oil tanker had ran aground at Bligh Reef eventually spilling 10.8 million gallons of crude oil. Exxon made a good attempt to mitigate the problem. A time consuming cleanup began with workers spraying bio-remediation chemicals on rocks, then manually wiping them down with paper, thus creating a mountain of clean up garbage in their wake. It cost Exxon an average of $1,000 per day to support one worker on a beach cleanup crew spraying rock faces with steam hoses. When the tide would change a new coating of oil would move onshore. Long after the manual clean up efforts were abandoned, beaches were monitored and it was assumed that oil was slowly decreasing at 0-4% per year, with only a 5% chance that the rate was as high as 4%. Even today, digging down a few inches on some beaches will expose oil.

Twenty one years later the Prince William Sound shrimp fishery finally recovered with the first commercial opener in Spring 2010.