Legacy of an Oil Spill
Out of anguish and despiar, a cjallenge to live more harmoniously in our fragile enironment
I woke on the moring of March 25 1989, to Alaska Public Radio Network news. There had been an oilspill from grounded tanker near Valdez. A lot of crude oil had already flowed out. I felt a sting, like an insect bite. A chilli up my spine.The toxin began to spread in my awareness, slowly at first, like the oil. By coincidence it was Good Friday, the 25th anniversary of the devastating March 1964 Alaska earthquake.
On Sunday 1 attended the Easter service at Anchorage Unity Church, the festival of Rebirth and Resurrection. Everyone was radiant, celebrating. How ironic, I thought. I was in the initial stages of grid at reports of dead oiled seabirds. In the afternoon the wind, which had remained calm in Valdez Arm for three days, suddenly rose to 60—70 knots out of the north and started to blow the oil into Prince William Sound. A sense of fatalism filled filled me when I heard the news.
Monday morning I decided to go to the Alaska Center for the Environment (ACE), a place where I had previously volunteered. The phone never stopped ringing all the time I was there. Amazing. Offers of help from all over the world! “I hear they need someone to scrub out a boat in Whittier to transport salmon fry to safety— I’ll go.” Another request—oiled animals needing care in Valdez 300 miles away. More volunteers—"I'll go, live in my car, take water, take a honey bucket. and work. It’s ok.’
lnternational TV calling for an interview. Skyspan, from London. A madhouse. TV crews coming in to the crowded ACE office, More calls: "We need welders' gloves to handle the otters; they bite through anything else.” There were calls for veterinarians, a call for boats to go out and protect fish hatcheries.
By Wednesday, after answering phones 16 hours a day. ACE, the Sierra Club. Audubon, and Greenpeace— among others—decided to set up a hotline in a vacant office, thereby enabling ACE to return to a slight semblance of normalcy. We were living on pizza and sandwiches, experiencing a tremendous roller coaster of emotions; during the day we were buoyed by the offers of help and sympathy, only to crash with despair every night. The Anchorage Daily News was full of devastating pictures-oiled murres, loons, guillemots. otters, bears, and eagles. I would put off listening to the news until late in the evening, then allow myself to fall apart completely.
I spent all my waking hours at the Oil Spill Volunteer Hotline office. Dozens of volunteers converged, wIth a few hours or many weeks to offer. New people with broken hearts, compelled to answer the call. People told us, even with four phone lines, that they had waited an hour to get through. Callers in tears. Callers angry. feeling trapped. A prisoner in a New Hampshire jail. An employee of The New York Times classified department. A Greenpeace member from Spain. A young woman from Toronto who was on her way to Anchorage to volunteer. An Eastern Airlines pilot from New Jersey, on strike, also on her way. New friends sleeping on my carpet en route to Homer or Valdez.
Eshamy Bay, the place where my former husband. Try wieland '56. and I had spent our honeymoon in 1957, was soon hit by the spreading oil. When I learned that, I lost my momentary control. In the face of the disaster, Eshamy has always been my ancestral home in Alaska, It was for me the most beautiful place on earth, because of the three months spent there, we decided to move back to Alaska permanently in 1961.
The cadre of friends who had suddenly coalesced at the hotline office shared the grief. We supported one another. The discovery of all these loving souls in Anchorage was a huge solace, Where had we all been? Some of us left friends and spouses to take up the challenge and discovered kindred spirits in one another Some went to Valdez to help clean oiled sea otters at the hastily established facilities in the college and high school gym. They returned as if shellshocked.
I grew up in Princeton. New Jersey. Spending all my free time in the woods near our home, focusing on the life within Stony Brook, under the rocks, along the banks, summer and winter. Those years created the basis for iiiy lifelong interest in the natural world.
In the meantime. I had put down roots in Alaska, Alaska the pristine. The place I took for granted when I was teaching for the Anchorage School District. I joined some environmental organizations. But the issues were often remote from my immediate world. Like my fellow Alaskans, I spent my oil revenue dividend each year from the state. I went to Kauai in winter to see the sun. In recent years. I built a small summer home on the beach in Homer, a very picturesque fishing arid farm imig community on Kachemak Bay.
When the first reports came from the Institute of Marine Science In Fair banks that, due to the prevailing currents in the Gulf of Alska, the oil would undoubtedly spread past the outer Kenai Peninsula coast to Kachemak bay and on to Kodiak, I was numb. Now the two other places on the planet that I loved best were also in jeopardy: Prince William sound and Kachemak Bay, home also to my older daughter, Leslie, and her husband. All we could do was to wait for the inevitable arrival of the thick brown "mousse" and tar balls that covered everything in thier path.
In earlt May a call came for volunteers at the newly formed sea otter rescue center in Seward, My dog and I went, spending a week there. The night I arrived, the first of many otter pups was born after midnight. It apperaed to be stillborn. the exhausted volunteer veteranian from Anchorage administrated mouth to mouth resuscitation, slaps on its hindquaters, and injections, all to no avail. The frail body the size of a child's stuffed toy slumped in his arms. Few of the pups survived. NUmbly, I returned to the back of my car for some sleep.
I took shifts of washing and drying otters, food preparation, and animal husbandry. Everyone wanted to wash the otters. That invloved two or three hours of repeated soaping and thorough rinsing while the animal was anesthetized. One person held the otter's head because it would frequtnly recover conciousness before the claning was complete and require another injection.
It was not possible to be in such close contact with otters without becoming completely captivated by them. These lage members of the weasel family are perfectly constrcted for thier life in the cold waters of the North Pacific. Thier sleek shape, strong tsil. little ears, whiskers, and short stubby nails made it hard for us to abide by the protocol of the rescue center. We were required to avoid eye contact and not to bond with any of the animals, because bonding would make it more difficult for them to be reintroduced to the wild.
Nevertheless, we quickly became familiar with thier anatomy. A large flap of skin and fur under the front legs is used as a carrying pouch to assist in transporting thier food from the bottom to the surface of the backs while dining. There is an area of coarser by fur on the middle of the chest, used by otters to hold clams, crabs, and other shellfish while the otter hits the prey with a rock or other object to rack it open. Sea otters are equipped with impressively large canine teeth and extremely strong jaws. We were ever viligantin thier presense.
Unlike other mammals, otters have no layer of blubber. Thier fur is remarkably fine and provides thier sole source of insulation. The fur is kept waterproofed by the animal's natural iols, which are distributed through the extensive grooming process. This insulation is compltetly broken dwon by exposure to crude oil. Removal of the spilled oil as well as the natural oil renders the animal vulnerable to hypothermia, so all animal had to be dried extremely thoughly. Otter fur got under our glasses, in our mouths, and up into our nostrils as we blow-dries them each for an hour or two. we saved little fur balls as souveniers.
Afetr the animals were completely dry, they were given another injectionto counteract the anesthetic and were evntually transferred to rectangular plastic swim tank. Otters are social animals and were often grouped together by age and sex. There they remained until it was determined that they were sufficiently recovered and thier fur was beginning to provide natural insulation once again. Then they were transfered to a larger pool, perhaps 25 feet in diameter and four feet deep. Sea water was pumped into all thesetanks dirctly from Resurrection Bay. Umtimately, otters were transfered to a floating long-range care part of Kachemak Bay near Homer, until they were released back into the environment in August 1989.
As the animals recovered, they developed voraciuos appetites and required feeding five times a day. Nothing was too good for these otters. They were given anywhere from 1 to 2.5 pounds of seafood per meal. One job of the animal husbandary shift was to present the food to the otter without looking them in the eye or talking to them and without dirctly feeding them.
The cages and fish totes had to be kept clean, so another job of the animal husbandary shift was to remove the excrement and allow fresh seawater into the totes. Charts on each animal needed to be updated every 15 minutes and information on the otters' progress recorded, including instances of shivering , grooming, swimming, sleeping, feeding, defecating,etc. we were generally assigned 10 otters each, so it was a busy shift. Exxon estimated that each otter that was saved cost them about $83000. Debates about the biological siginificance of this effort, that saved a few hundred animals (some of whichwere unacounted for in ocean surveys in 1990), raged privately and in the media. Meanwhile, the dead bodies of thier peers that were retrived but not saved, over 1000 in number, along with more than 30000 dead birds, rest frozen in evidence bags until a future trail date. It is estimated that these frozen sea otters and birds represent only a fraction of the total number that died in the oil spill.
Soon after I returned to Anchorage from Seward, the word came that, as predicted and along dreaded, oil was beginning to hit the beaches of Kachemak Bay near Homer. I moved down early for the summer and soon joined the volunteer force claening up oil from behind my summer cabin. There were tar balls and oozing globs distributed about one meter apart along the high-tide line.
A new concern confronted us. What about our eagles? We have a healthy resident population, but even a single death due to oiling or ingestion of an oiled carcass would be too many. The discovery of a partially eaten, complete with three chicks, was very disheratening. Mercifully, the eagles survived this indiscretion. IN fact, all three eagles fledged later in the summer. Others, however, were not so fortunate; 11 dead oiled eagles were eventually recovered in the Homer area.
With the birth of Erika, my first grandchild, on June 20, 1989, a new era dawned. Gradually, holding my beautiful granddaughter, I dared to focus once again upon the future. What could I do, as an individual, to try to change our inordinate dependence on oil and profligate waste? My younger daughter, Linda was living in Oxford, england. I write to her for help in locating a new book called The Green Consumer Guide.
My friends and I had so immersed ourselves in our variuos responses to the spill that much of the time we blotted out opportunities to reflect upon what had happened. An entire state had been jolted to its core. The waves lapped outward, reaching around the planet. Alska is dependent upon the oil industry for 80% of its revenues . We do not have a state tax; instaed, the state issues yearly dividened checks to bona fide residents. Where could we go from here? Some of the turmoil manisfested itself in obstinate behavior. There was the moment the supermarket checker asked me if i wanted paper or plastic bags, and i blurted, "Neither."
"I know," he said, "tress or oil." I appreciated his awareness, one that seemed to be springing up in many new quaters.
Meanwhile, yet another opportunity for volunteer involvement arose. A group led by Benn Levine and Billy Day of Homer had persuaded the Alaska Division of State Parks to set aside a Kachemak bay Wilderness Park beach called Mars Cove, which had been completelt oiled, as an experimental site. Here volunteers could try out Day's new inventio, a rock washer, in an attempt to clean a beach without destroying the surviving intertidal life, as the hot-spray method used eslewhere appeared to be doing.
Our trip to Mars Cove was a long one-8.5 hours by boat. I went on THe MAyflower, a commercial fishing boat skippered by Rich King. We slipped past the familiar stretches of Homer and Kachemak Bay on a foggy morning in late August. The water was glassy, and everywhere we were surrounded by shearwaters, puffins, and gulls as we headed west.
As the fog lifted, we found ourselves in calm seaz rounding Point Adams and turning east into the GUlf of Alaska, toward our destination in Port Dick. The scenery became more dramatic, with cliffs plunging into the sae. we stopped to bring abroad a length of loose boom. It would find a place in the operation at Mars Cove. The seas came up, and soon we found ourselves with the water breaking over the windshield. Rich was intensely busy reading the loran positions, trying to avoid shoals on one side and Gore Rock, a notorious navigational hazard, on the other.
At last e arrived at our destination and found a colourful tent and trap settlement. Disembarking, we waded through a rainbow-coloured sheen, even as sea lions surfaced farthur out from us. Mountain goats appeared on the mountains in the distance. Wild flowers bloomed in profusion near the camp.
The volunteers, as usual, were from cross planet. The skiff operators were two young mechanics from switzerland. THe cook was a militant vergertarian jwelrymaker from Hawaii. There was a cardiology resident from Georgia who came "to atone for participating in the consumer society."
My main contribution at Mars Cove was surveying the interidal and determine the abundance of invertebrates that had survived (or perished) in the massive oiling that these beaches, almost 250 miles from the spill zone, had sustained. I remember finding two live hermit crabs huddled under a rock, with perhaps six inches of unoiled deiment their only buffer againest certain death. The odor of the oil was overwhelming. It had acted as an impenetrable seal to the life below it, so that when we dug through it, we were greeted with the nauseating fumes of hydrogen sulfide, the product of the anaerobic decomposition of the clams, worms, and other organisms that lay entombed beneath the six or seven incjes of oily beach.
I found that participating in physically claning up the oil was a strangely healing process. Morale was high, even though we were living inquite primitive surroundings. Our latrine was a frame built of two by fours over a trench under a tarp with the admonition " Burn T.P or Die" attached to a coffee can with matches provided for that duty. My tent was on a knoll under the protection of old-growth spruce trees overlooking incredibly beautiful and wild at POrt Dick, one of the many fjords that penetrate the south coast of Kenai Peninsula. A tarp above my tent shielded it from the frequent rain.
One evening as I was surveying the seaweed at the water's edge, I heard a low whistle like a breath blown over the mouth of a soda pop bottle. It startled me, coming from near my elbow. There, only a few feet away, was a large male sea otter. He regarded me motionessly, without evidence of fear. We stared at each other across the gulf of separate species, a glance of perfect understanding. Tears of reconition ran down my cheeks. Although we were in remote wilderness area, we were able to hear the public radio station from Homer. Five times a day we clustered around the radios to lsten for Bay Bushlines sent to Mars Cove, promising us shipments of food as soon as the weather broke. On one subline evening, an hou's variety of versions of pachelbel's canon in D was featured. We were now dark enough to see the vivid aurora borealis.
After 12 days at Mars Cove, the 30 minute floatplane ride back to Homer was not enough to prepare me for the shock of the colours of civilization from the air: fishing boats, cabin roofs, junkk cars, parking lots, and finally Beluga Lake, where we landed in Homer. It was hard to part with the freinds with whom, I had shared this experince.
It has been difficult todescribe to anyone not dirctly affacted by the oil spill what it meant to me and to other Alaskanz. I knew when i returned to my home in Anchorage in September that I would never be the same person that I was before MArch 24, 1989. The challenge was to take the anguish, the despair and turn it into a new perpective. I re-examnined many of the basic assumptions by which I conducted my life. Diet, clothing, shelther, and transportation underwent cose scrutinity. what emerged was closer to voluntary simplicity of lifestlye, one that I find more satisfying and less wasteful than its preecessor. There are big comprmises, however, particularly in the realm of travel.
Serendipitously, the British version of The Green Consumer Giuide awaited me upon my return to Anchorage. I devoured it, nothing its comparatively sensitive attitude toward environmental concerns. agai, as luck would have it, when i arrived a few weeks later in Toronto to visit my sisiter, I found that the Canadians had just piblished thier version of the guide.
In Anchorage I set about to try to find some energy-and-habitat saving products that were mentioned in the Canadian guide. The Canadian R-2000 program had its counterpart in the Alaska HOme Craftman Program, in which people in the construction industry are trained to build using the most up-to-dateenergy -efficient methods, employing new materials such as reflective or argon-filled glazing and Swedish vapour barrier material. Lo and behold, compact flourecent light globes were alredy available in Ancorage and eslewhere. I began to work in earnest on compiling a dirctory of ways and means to reduce energy waste and habitat destruction in south centyral Alaska, locating business and identifying processes that helped people reuse items rather than fying all recycling centers, with a list of acceptable items.
The Alaska Center foe the Environment became interested in promoting the project for Earth Day 1990. Contributions and editors offered thier help. Visiting business across the region was a challnge, but the payoff came when a local plumbing and heating contractor took his place as one of the sponsors of the project., along with the local chapter of the Sierra Club. Mu son-in-law Jens drew marvelous caryoons to lighten up the theme.of the text: It is time that we Alaskans examine our daily lives and find ways, simple and not so simple, to immediately alter our impact on this planet. The 80-page dirctory was distributed staewide on Earth Day inside 80000 copies of The Anchorage Daily News.
I have joined those alaskans who do not want the Artic National Wildlife Refuge opened to oil expploration. I believe that our thirst for oil can be satisfied by other means: By instituting a varity of greater conservation efforts and by reactivating oil production in areas of the country where the potential impacts of oil processing are not so great and where the necessity of oil transport over wtaer does not exist. I'm a believer in natural gas as a less-polluting fuel to help tide usbthrough the transition away from nonrenewable fuels that we must soon make. It will not be easy.
Anne Pascu Wieland '56
Source : SWARTHMORE Nov 1991
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