The Observer, January, 2009

New volunteer is absolutely impressed by council

By KYLE VON BOSE

Council Content Writer

Valdez resident Steve Bushong is the Terminal Operations and Environmental Monitoring Committee’s newest member. Bushong serves as chief operating officer at Copper Valley Electric and has 15 years of experience in Alaska’s energy industry.

Before moving to Valdez, Bushong and his family lived in the small town of Dillingham, in Bristol Bay. The Bushongs moved to the remote port town in 1993 from Virginia with their three sons, whose ages were two, three, and eight years.

“We really liked Dillingham a lot. It was pretty exciting,” Bushong said. “We were really into running up rivers on our snow machines, king salmon fishing, moose hunting, we had a blast.”

In Dillingham, a large portion of the population rides snow machines and ATVs down the streets, on the sidewalks, and all around town. Bushong’s kids grew up riding snow machines to school. So their move to Valdez in 2002 was something of a culture shock for his three boys.
“When we first moved, my middle son couldn’t understand why everyone was so uptight,” Bushong said. ”That same middle son really didn’t like the idea that we were moving to a place that had a road going into it. He thought there would be too many people.”

Bushong, however, has gotten used to the idea of having the Richardson Highway available for his cruising pleasure. He recently bought a BMW motorcycle and enjoys making trips back and forth between Valdez and Anchorage during the summer.

At Copper Valley Electric, Bushong faces many of the same challenges that Alaskans face throughout the state: trying to control the growing cost of energy. For Valdez that involves the exploration of additional hydropower.

Bushong said he became active with the Terminal Operations and Environmental Monitoring Committee after his neighbor Tom Kuckertz, a member of the Copper Valley Electric board of directors and a project manager for the council, talked him into joining. Bushong said he was impressed by Tom and the council, and has always had a natural curiosity about what was going on across the Sound.

“I think Tom does a very good job of being able to communicate some very technical issues in a way that some of us as volunteers can get our arms around it and say, ‘Oh, so that’s what’s going on.’ I think that’s just pretty cool.”

Bushong lends the committee his knowledge in engineering and emergency incident planning and response. In Dillingham he was trained as an incident commander for their small tank farm.

Bushong is glad the citizens’ council serves as a mechanism to verify that oil transportation in the Sound has the appropriate checks and balances.

“I find it to be absolutely entertaining,” Bushong said. “What I’ve found is a particularly sincere group of people that are interested in protecting the environment, but have the understanding that an industrial process like this needs to get done as efficiently and cost effectively as possible. I also like that the group I’m involved with is absolutely sincere and 100 percent professional.”
Bushong said that some of the things he has learned as a member of the committee have really opened his eyes to the realities of Alaska’s oil industry.

“The one big thing that has just blown me away, is despite all we hear about the throughput of oil going down, the dollar value of what is going through is incredible,” Bushong said. In 2002, the North Slope crude moving through Valdez was worth about $700,000,000 a month; in 2008, throughput value exceeded $2 billion per month.

“Anybody who thinks there aren’t a lot of issues left to deal with, needs to see what those dollar amounts are. There’s plenty of things left to do here and there’s plenty of money for the oil companies to make sure it’s done right.”

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