The Observer, May 2007
Project will document spill history
The citizen’s council has launched a project to compile an oral history of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Sharon Bushell, a Homer oral historian, will record more than 100 interviews with people directly involved in the spill or its aftermath.
The results will be published in two volumes, the first containing the interviews themselves, and the second analyzing the interviews for lessons about the causes and effects of the spill, as well as the cleanup effort that followed.
The spill, in March 1989, is one of the most important events in Alaska history, yet no comprehensive oral history has ever been attempted, according to a council review of available resources that preceded the decision to start its own project.
“It came as a surprise to us that so little work of this type was ever done, considering how much has been written about the spill,” said John Devens, executive director of the council. “With the 20th anniversary in sight, we decided we needed to capture the memories and insights of people with first-hand involvement in the spill before it was too late.”
The interview subjects will include people in communities affected by the spill, commercial fishermen, cleanup workers, officials of regulatory agencies such as the Coast Guard and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and employees from companies at the center of the event, such as Exxon, Alyeska Pipeline, and VECO.
While the project is just getting rolling and the time frame is still somewhat uncertain, the council hopes to be able to publish the first volume, containing the interviews, during 2009, twenty years after the Exxon spill.
The second volume is expected to follow approximately a year later.
The council plans to distribute many free copies of the oral history to libraries, regulators, elected officials, and oil-industry personnel. Additional copies will be sold at printing cost.
In addition, the council plans to make the history downloadable as an electronic book from its web site, www.pwsrcac.org. The transcribed interviews will also be posted there, and, as technology allows, so will the recordings of the interviews.
Bushell is a veteran Alaska writer who produced a series of oral history interviews that ran for years in the Anchorage Daily News. They were later compiled into a two-volume book called “We Alaskans – Stories of people who helped build the Great Land.”
“I’m extremely excited that the spill project is under way,” Bushell said. “I look forward to traveling around Alaska with my recorder and capturing what people remember about those days.”
Sharon Bushell of Homer is the oral historian for the council’s project. Photo courtesy of Sharon Bushell.