“As the oil came to the surface it made a gurgling noise, and big bloops would leap right out of the water two to four feet.”
Mark Delozier, Coast Guard officer, Valdez, Alaska
“The tanker was grinding something fierce. It sounded like a train. Our greatest fear was that it was going to break apart.”
Rick Wade, commercial diver, Valdez
“There was no effort whatsoever being made to clean up.”
Steve Cowper, governor of Alaska, 1986–1990
“While the ship was at Naked Island, she had no bottom. She was literally floating on a bubble.”
Tom Blanchard, Exxon Valdez second mate after the spill
“ ‘Serious as a heart attack.’ ”
Steve McCall, Coast Guard commander, Valdez, Alaska
“The window of opportunity was in the first forty-eight hours, and for the first forty-eight hours we at Alyeska were trying to figure out what the hell to do.”
Gary Bader, human resources manager, Alyeska Pipeline Service Company
“That auditorium was absolutely electric. There was so much fear and anger, you could hear it crackling through the audience.”
Dennis Kelso, commissioner, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation
“I really didn’t want to tell people how hopeless it was, as far as getting the oil off the water anytime soon. I tried to be as honest as I could because we had to keep looking at the positive side.”
Frank Iarossi, president, Exxon Shipping Company
“I realized that, for two whole hours, I had not seen one bird, one otter, one seal, or any other living creature. It was like there had been a nuclear attack, with cities still standing but not a living soul to be seen. Something broke inside of me then.”
Stan Stephens, Valdez tour boat operator
“In my job, I’ve seen a lot of destruction, but I had never seen anything quite like that of the Exxon Valdez.”
Harry Allen, Environmental Response Team, Environmental Protection Agency
“Our civilization had no concept of the scale of our actions. Correspondingly, we had no notion of our ability to destroy and our inability to fix it.”
Charles Wohlforth, reporter, Anchorage Daily News
“That was when I realized that their goal was not to pick up the oil. They just wanted to cover up and say it was clean and hope that the winter storms would wash it away.”
Roy Robertson, Seldovia resident
“There was death everywhere, dead birds, dead otters, dead deer…It was a terrible scene, one to rival anyone’s idea of hell.”
Kelley Weaverling, Cordova resident
“There was a seal who had been screaming for hours, trying to get on her boat, trying to get out of the oil. The sound of a seal’s scream is exactly like that of a baby’s, and it kept hitting the side of her hull, trying to climb on board.”
Tom Copeland, Cordova fisherman
“I felt like I was speaking for the environment, for the birds, for the herring, the whales. That is what drove me. Somebody had to speak for those critters.”
Michelle Hahn O’Leary, Cordova fisherman
“We swooped down to get a better look and instantly got into a cloud of hydrocarbons. We all started feeling nauseous. Steve banked the plane, and we flew up into clean air.”
Ricki Ott, Cordova resident
“We used to go out almost every weekend, even if it was raining. We’d go out and picnic, take the canoe and have a day. We don’t do that anymore…the spirit of the water has changed.”
Larry Evanoff, Chenega Bay resident
“Exxon had bought a lot of Inipol…We said, ‘So you’re going to spray all this stuff, which we know is cancer-causing, all over the beaches and all over the oyster beds and everything else that’s in the nearshore area and we’re not supposed to be worried about that?’ We wouldn’t let them do it.”
Anne Castellina, National Park Service, Seward
“I’d been working in the oil industry for the previous ten years…To have to witness the death of the environment, the death of the water, by the hands of work that I had done myself, was emotionally devastating to me.”
Tim Robertson, Seldovia resident
“When you have a disaster like the Exxon Valdez, it goes beyond money. You can’t repair emotions and you can’t repair the loss of an ecosystem.”
Jane Eismann, Kodiak resident
“The oil industry dumped every last vestige of trying to do the right job on oil spill response.”
Walt Parker, chair, Alaska Oil Spill Commission
“It was deathly silent. All you could hear was the lapping of oil on the rocks of the beach with the wave action. It gave all of us a sense of death on a big scale.”
Jeff Short, oil pollution researcher, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
“We began to realize that, yes, the animals were gone. And they’ve never come back. We didn’t find the bodies. Unfortunately, killer whales sink most of the time.”
Craig Matkin, marine biologist and Homer resident
“The fishermen of Cordova had a lot of fear around the construction of a pipeline across Alaska to Prince William Sound. It turns out they were right. Fishemen know boats and they know that people in boats can and do make mistakes.”
Rick Steiner, Cordova resident
“The majority of our respondents believe that the Sound’s ecosystem will not recover within their lifetime. For many, the only way the Exxon Valdez disaster will end is when they die.”
Duane A. Gill, sociologist, Mississippi State University
“I just hope to God another oil spill never happens here or any other place again.”
Belen and Joe Cook, Cordova residents
“I left the town that I love, my business, my friends. But my angst was so huge that, if I had stayed, I don’t think I would have lived.”
Margy Johnson, Cordova innkeeper and former Mayor of Cordova
“When Exxon said they would make us whole, they ended up putting a hole in us, a hole in our hearts.”
Mike Webber, Cordova fisherman
“I was in a deep hole. I felt like I was worthless. Without counseling I might have taken my life.”
Kory Blake, Cordova fisherman
“For the most part, the town ‘fathers’ were out on boats, and an amazing set of women ran the meetings at home.”
Mead Treadwell, spill response director, City of Cordova
“We had to get to the beach early in the morning before the eagles did, because if they found anything oily that had washed up or crawled up overnight, they were on it fast.”
Joe Banta, Cordova fisherman
“It was hard to get our points across a lot of times to people from Houston who worked for Exxon. They just really didn’t understand Alaska, and they didn’t understand small town life, so they certainly couldn’t understand village life, or Native subsistence life.”
Darrell Totemoff, Chenega Bay resident
“A couple of times, at the public meetings where Exxon kept telling everybody how wonderful things were going, police officers had to be called in because we had some people who were pretty upset.”
Jerome Selby, mayor, Kodiak Island Borough
“I went down to the beach and looked around, and the mussels had all died. I’d touch them and they’d fall off the rocks.”
Elenore McMullen, Port Graham resident
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