Some injured species are still recovering. The people and economies of communities in the oil spill region suffered in the months and years following the spill. Commercial fishing and tourism were especially affected.
The first three days after the Exxon Valdez oil spill afforded nearly ideal weather for oil recovery. Seas and winds were calm. Two decades later, they agree on one thing with regard to Exxon Valdez: the first three days were lost. The chemicals, which are being used widely in the current Gulf spill crisis, break oil into fine droplets so that it can be absorbed into the water and degrade naturally.
Warm water and wave action speed the mixing and energy. Kelso remembers the early days differently, though his conclusion is the same. Exxon, which had relied on an unreliable contractor to prepare for the spill, was scrambling in the first few days. Conflicts over dispersants were one of the first between the main players in the cleanup -- state authorities like Kelso, Exxon leaders like Maki, and the federal government, including John Robinson, the chief scientist at the spill for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Robinson remembers two years of animosity and contention, a management problem that contributed to the oil spill issue -- and which was dealt with directly by legislation the following year that gave the federal government clear authority to step in and take charge of a spill response, as it has done on the Gulf Coast.
The storm which swept through three days after the crash totally changed the game, making it a desperate attempt to keep oil away from sensitive areas and muster resources. An obvious solution to too much oil is to send it up in flames. Some 15, gallons burned in about 75 minutes in one attempt the day after the spill.
But others proved futile. Little seemed to be happening the day after the spill, and Exxon panicked at the lack of clear action. There was no incident command system, the standard hierarchy that is used for responses to natural disasters and is now automatically activated to respond to oil spills.
Kopchak, a longtime Cordova commercial fisherman and development director for the Prince William Sound Science Center. Some just got buckets.
Exxon coordinated with the group, and Kelso says it shamed the oil giant into action. The oil kept spreading. In four days it was 37 miles from the spill site. In two weeks it was miles. By day 56, a sheen of crude stretched miles. But two months in, guerrilla warfare had turned into a corporate campaign. Exxon had mobilized in full. Some 11, workers were washing rocks, first with rags and then with power hoses. The main plan was to float the oil off the beaches.
Since oil floats, flooded beaches would shed the oil, which could be caught at the waterline. It was more than a big effort though. It was a big mistake, Robinson said. Nine strips of beach were left untouched as an experiment, and those nine beaches look better today than the swept ones, where whatever was alive was cooked to death in superhot water.
Maki, the Exxon scientist, disagrees. Exxon also put fertilizer on beaches far and wide, calculating that naturally existing microbes that eat naturally seeping hydrocarbons would multiply with the fertilizer and munch up the oil, which many said was indeed the case.
Oily rocks glisten in the sun on Green lsland in Prince William Sound. This section of beach, earlier signed off as being environmentally stable by both Exxon and the Coast Guard, was re-oiled on July 4, Crews clean up an oil soaked beach on Naked Island on April 2, An oil skimming operation works in a heavy oil slick near Latouche Island on April 1, The bird was taken to the bird cleanup center in Valdez by photographers. Many seabirds, such as cormorants and murres, were killed by the spilled oil.
One baby and five adult oil-soaked sea otters lie dead on Green Island beach on April 3, A DC-6 plane sprays chemical dispersants on the oil spilled from the tanker Exxon Valdez on March 27, An oil slick swirls over Prince William Sound, Alaska, on April 2, , about 50 miles from where the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground. A clean-up worker rakes through crude oil, contained by floating booms off the waters of Prince William Sound on April 16, Coast Guard skimmer.
On his hands and knees, a member of the cleanup crew scrubs oil soaked rocks on Naked Island on April 2 An oil soaked sea bird rests in a towel in the animal rescue center on March 31, A cleanup worker uses high pressure, high temperature water to wash crude oil off the rocky shore of Block Island on April 17, Beach workers coordinated with offshore workers to contain and remove oil from beaches.
Hot water from high-pressure hoses was originally used to clean beaches, but workers switched to cold water after discovering that hot water was killing shoreline organisms. Aerial view of a maxi-barge and spill workers hosing a beach, oil sheen trapped in containment boom, on LaTouche lsland, on September 11, Crews use high-pressure hoses to blast the rocks on this beach front on Naked Island on April 21, An assembly of some of the animals killed by the oil, including seabirds and a sea otter.
An oil covered bird is examined on an island in Prince William Sound in April of Aerial photo of a berthing vessel, a "floating hotel" that housed oil spill workers, on Prince William Sound, in July of
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