On the surface, everything looks just the same: Glistening white icebergs float across the dark blue ocean, while sea otters swim around in the waves.
But despite this apparent idyll at Prince William Sound on the coast of Alaska, there are still traces of one of the largest environmental disasters in US history.
On March 24, 1989, the US tanker Exxon Valdez rammed into the Bligh Reef and sprung a history-altering leak: Nearly 40,000 tons of crude oil spilled out of the tanker, coating 2,400 kilometres of coast.
It was shortly after midnight and the tanker carrying 163,000 tons of crude oil from the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was heading towards California. The seas were calm when it hit the reef.
The captain was asleep and had left command of the ship in the hands of an officer with less experience.
The Bligh Reef is hard to access, reachable only by plane, helicopter or ship, which made staging an emergency operation very difficult.
The consequences of the accident were dramatic: Fishing on the reef was brought to a halt. Many families living nearby – entire villages – had their livelihood destroyed. The oil company Exxon was overwhelmed with complaints and eventually had to pay out billions towards clean-up efforts, damages and fines.
Many new rules and precautionary measures were implemented in the wake of the incident. Now, only double-hulled tankers are allowed in the region, and ships must be accompanied by multiple tugboats. The Bligh Reef is now marked with warning lights to prevent it from being struck again.
But the most dramatic consequences of the accident have been those for local wildlife. Prince William Sound used to be one of the most untouched and diverse ecosystems in the entire United States.
An estimated 250,000 seabirds and thousands of other animals died as a consequence of the oil spill, including sea otters, seals, grey whales and Pacific herring. The effects are still being felt today: Crude oil remnants can still be found in sediment around the shore. Researchers continue to monitor the area intensively.
“The oil is still there, and it is still toxic,” marine biologist Richard Steiner, who has sharply criticised the clean-up effort, told dpa in 2014. “The idea of an oil spill cleanup is a myth.”
As a direct result of the spill, the US Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which helped set out a compensation fund for those affected, as well as an institute to study oil spill responses.
“One really big [factor] was lingering oil,” said retired scientist Jeffrey Short, who was the US government’s lead scientist following the accident, in an interview 30 years later with local broadcaster KTUU.
“We discovered that the oil persisted on the shorelines for way longer than anybody thought it would. Because of that, there were long-term effects because animals kept getting re-exposed,” he said.
Some populations, like that of the sea otter, have almost fully recovered. However, others, like the Pacific herring, salmon and orcas, are not there yet.
“Our work shows that recovery of species vulnerable to long-term effects of oil spills can take decades,” said researcher Brenda Ballachey in 2014 on the results of a count of various animal populations in Prince William Sound.
The Exxon Valdez disaster shocked people around the world and burned itself into their memories. However, its record was beaten just a few years later when the Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. For five months, a total of 780 million litres of oil leaked in the ocean – far more than from the Exxon Valdez accident.
However, although the environmental impact in the Gulf of Mexico was significant, it was in many ways fleeting compared to the effects felt at Prince William Sound: The Exxon Valdez spill was in shallow coastal waters, while the Deepwater Horizon was in the open sea.
Importantly, crude oil broke down much faster in the warm, nearly tropical environment of the Gulf of Mexico, compared to the frigid waters of Alaska, scientists have said. Only time will tell the real effects. – dpa
