By STEVE ROTHCHILD
Administrative Deputy Director
For two days in March, council board members Dorothy Moore and Robert Beedle, accompanied by staff members Mark Swanson and Steve Rothchild, visited our nation’s capital in an effort to highlight some of the council’s major concerns to Alaska’s congressional delegation and several others.
The trip was facilitated by the council’s Washington based legislative affairs monitor, Roy Jones.
Volunteer Spotlight
On March 23, 1989, Prince William Sound fisherman Gordon Scott didn’t know a thing about oil spills, and if you had asked him that day, he probably wouldn’t have been too interested.
“I was in Anchorage selling shrimp when the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks.”
On Friday morning, March 24, he saw the headlines about the spill. He didn’t fish near Bligh Reef, so at first he wasn’t worried. On his rounds delivering shrimp, however, all the customers he talked to were asking if this would affect him. Would he still be able to keep fishing for shrimp?
“Of course,” he told them, “this isn’t going to affect me! I’m a fisherman, that’s an oil spill, it’s a tanker.”
By ZACHARY VERFAILLIE
Council Intern
As an Emergency Management major at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, I was excited for the opportunity to work in Valdez as an intern with the council. The project I was given involved using the Fishing Vessel Availability reports from Alyeska’s Ship Escort/Response Vessel System, known as SERVS, to determine which vessels were available to respond in the unfortunate event of an oil spill in Prince William Sound.
From the Executive Director • Mark Swanson is the executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council. This past spring, with the 25th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, virtually everyone associated with that spill or connected to current spill prevention and response activities encountered media representatives asking some variation of: … Read more