Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the recovery of Prince William Sound is still the subject of debate.

Prince William Sound is hiding a 20-year-old secret.
Turn over a rock on a beach on northern Knight Island and you’ll see it.
Count the migratory shorebirds, sea otters or orcas in the western sound and you’ll see its effects.
Decades after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in the Valdez Narrows, oil is still present in Prince William Sound.
Last spring marked the 20th anniversary of the spill, which happened just after midnight on March 24, 1989. Most people visiting the sound today would be hard-pressed to find any evidence of the oil spilled that night. The water is clear, and birds, fish and mammals appear plentiful and thriving. Even those people involved in monitoring the oil and its ecological effects agree that the sound appears, for the most part, healthy.
“If you go out into the area today, you’ll see what looks like a largely pristine sound,” said Brenda Ballachey, a scientist with the United States Geological Survey who has done extensive research in the area since the spill.
But Ballachey and other experts said that despite the sound’s pristine appearance, oil is still contaminating the region’s ecosystem and hampering population growth in resident species.
Have Prince William Sound and its inhabitants truly recovered over the past two decades, or are appearances deceiving? That depends on who you ask, and on their definition of recovery.

Two Sides to the Story
The Exxon Valdez oil spill was one of the largest in U.S. history, leaking nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil—250,000 barrels—into the sound. It caused a ecological disaster, as storm-fueled waves and strong ocean currents dispersed the oil over 11,000 square miles of water, spreading it along 1,300 miles of Alaska’s coastline.
An estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs were destroyed by the contamination. Sport- and commercial-fishing businesses were devastated. ExxonMobil reports it spent $2.1 billion on cleanup and, at its peak, 10,000 people, 1,000 boats and 100 airplanes and helicopters were involved in the effort.
Representatives of ExxonMobil—which in 1992 paid $1 billion to settle state and federal government lawsuits over the spill and is in the process of meting out a little more than $1 billion in compensatory and punitive damages to 32,000 fishermen and others—say the sound and its inhabitants have recovered.
“Our position is that the sound is healthy and robust and thriving, and there are a number of studies that have been prepared that reach that same conclusion,” said Alan Jeffers, an ExxonMobil spokesperson.
The company’s Web site offers a lengthy official position on recovery, explaining that any disagreement over recovery in the sound is “largely a technical argument over the precise scientific definition of recovery.”
Those who disagree with ExxonMobil’s definition, including members of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council—the group of scientists and community members established to oversee spending ExxonMobil’s $1 billion in settlement money and monitor restoration efforts—say they will not define the sound as recovered until all animal species harmed by the spill have returned to—or exceeded—the population numbers of March 23, 1989, the day before the spill. Some populations of sea otters, harlequin ducks and orcas are far below those goals, and the region’s herring fishery, which crashed a few years after the spill, remains closed. Some question whether oil is to blame.
“(The sound) has not recovered to pre-spill conditions, that much is clear,” said Jeff Short, who, until he retired at the end of 2008, was supervisory research chemist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Auke Bay laboratory in Juneau.
ExxonMobil said the Trustee Council’s definition is “not a practical or accurate measure of the actual state of recovery in the sound,” and that the Trustee Council is putting too much stock in just a few animals about which too little definitive pre-spill information exists.
“The Prince William Sound ecosystem is populated by thousands of other species that were not impacted by the spill, or were impacted but recovered quickly,” the company’s Web site statement says. What’s more, ExxonMobil argues that the natural environment in Prince William Sound would not be the same today as it was 20 years ago, whether the spill had occurred or not.
“Nature changes all the time, a concept that scientists call ‘natural variability,’” the company’s position says. “We all witness natural variability when, for example, there is a big winter storm, a heat wave, or an El Nino event. That’s why we can’t expect that Prince William Sound will ever be exactly, precisely as it was before the spill. Any definition that uses as an absolute standard the return to pre-spill conditions just isn’t realistic.”
Many agree that the sound has come a long way toward recovery and that some of ExxonMobil’s points are valid.
“There has been a lot of recovery,” said Craig Tillery, an Alaska deputy attorney general and member of the Trustee Council. “Some species have recovered quite clearly, like the bald eagle. But there are still some species that have not recovered and some, frankly, we won’t ever know if they have recovered because there wasn’t enough baseline data to refer to. The relationship to the spill is a bit uncertain.”
Short, too, sees a lot of progress.
“Well under one percent of the oil that initially was spilled remains, and 99 percent of it is gone,” he said. “Compared to the amount (of oil) that was originally let out, it is almost completely recovered.”
But he is not ready to label Prince William Sound fully recovered.
“I look at it kind of like Chernobyl,” he said referring to the town in the Ukraine where a nuclear power-plant reactor exploded in 1986, releasing massive amounts of radioactive material—estimated as the equivalent of 100 atom bombs—into the atmosphere. “You can say the radioactivity there has decreased to less than one percent of what it was at the time of the meltdown so everything is better, let’s move on.”

The Residual Oil Debate
Take a glacier cruise or sport-fishing charter out of Whittier, Valdez or Cordova today, or kayak and camp in the sound’s many bays, inlets and islands, and it’s unlikely you’d see any evidence there was a devastating oil spill there 20 years ago.
“To the casual observer you would see sea otters and birds, and catch fish, and you wouldn’t see any oil,” Tillery said.
“Unless you go with someone who can show you where to look, you probably won’t see oil on the beaches,” said Ballachey, the otter researcher. “You would have to know where to go and where to dig, or dig a lot of pits to find oil, but it is still there.”
And there is still a lot of it.
“If you dig down you would be, frankly, quite shocked as to the amount of oil that is there,” Tillery said.
The oil that remains in Prince William Sound today is mainly buried under or hidden behind rocks, and it isn’t going away very quickly. Short said the current rate of dispersal is somewhere between zero and four percent per year.
“It is going to take a lot longer than we ever anticipated,” Tillery said. “Certain beaches, such as those on northern Knight Island, are going to remain contaminated for a long time.”
ExxonMobil does not deny the presence of oil or that it will likely remain there for a considerable length of time.
“Shoreline excavation efforts indicate that perhaps a total of 26 acres of buried oil remain in isolated pockets and wave shadows of large boulders,” its official statement reads. “Researchers of international reputation, supported by ExxonMobil, do not dispute the issue. There is nothing new here that has not been seen in other worldwide spills over the past 40 years. It is likely that these small pockets will remain for many years to come.”
The two sides disagree, however, about the level of threat the lingering oil poses.
“Our research does confirm that these small pockets of residual oil are not a source of contamination for intertidal species, which in turn serve as the food base for larger species such as harlequin ducks and sea otters,” ExxonMobil’s Web statement reads.
Jeffers, ExxonMobil’s spokesperson, reiterated that position.
“We do acknowledge that there is oil that is still in place, but really we are depending on the results of the scientific evaluations as to the health and recovery of the region,” he said.
Mark Harwell is one of the scientists whose research Jeffers referred to. He is an independent ecological assessment consultant who, along with his business partner, John Gentile—a former senior scientist for the Environmental Protection Agency—has been funded by the EPA and by ExxonMobil to assess the state of Prince William Sound. When contracted by the EPA, their job was to assess all existing research and published reports to determine if there were any remaining effects from the Exxon Valdez oil still in the sound. That review found that, with two possible exceptions—one pod of orcas and one subpopulation of sea otters—there were “no ecologically significant effects” detectable.
“The disagreements in the literature are regarding a subpopulation of sea otters at northern Knight Island,” Harwell said. “It is clear the entire population of sea otters in the sound has recovered and exceeded pre-spill levels.”
But Short and other scientists said any effect from residual oil, even if it is evident only in a portion of the population, is cause for concern.
“The reason we are concerned with the remaining oil is that collateral evidence suggests lingering biological impacts from (residual oil),” he said. “The other thing that concerns us is that the oil that does remain, particularly the oil below the surface of the beaches, has not weathered and is still capable of harming animals if it is disturbed and mobilized in the environment.
“In areas that were heavily oiled, unlike the surrounding populations, some species are just not recovering, so that a surprisingly long time after the spill they have suffered considerable levels of mortality in prime-age individuals, Short said. “It’s looking like now, 20 years out, we are not in the clear.”

Otters, Whales and Oil
There are a few post-spill images that haunt the minds of many in Alaska and around the world to this day: bird carcasses floating in oil slicks, the collapsed dorsal fin of a killer whale, sweet-faced sea otters attempting to clean their oil-coated fur. It was a dramatic and devastating event.
No one disputes that the Exxon Valdez oil spill was particularly catastrophic for sea otters. Oil eliminated the insulating properties of their fur and killed or contaminated their food supplies.
“The first fall after the spill, in late 1989, finding otters in heavily oiled areas was difficult,” Ballachey said. “In 1994 there was still a dearth of otters. They were not numbers coming back up to what we expected. And we have not seen an increase in the number of otters (in that part of the sound) and that troubles us a bit. Something seems to be limiting the population for recovery in the heavily oiled areas. We are still monitoring it, and there are still questions about the status of recovery.”
Ballachey admitted that pre-spill population surveys were inadequate (much more sophisticated studies have been done in the years since), but she said even primitive methods of population counting reveal the otters around northern Knight Island are still under pre-spill numbers.
“Thirty-three carcasses came out of Herring Bay after the spill, and we have not seen that many in Herring Bay since,” she said.
Ballachey agrees that stressors other than oil could be affecting the sea otter population that is still in trouble, but she said the evidence that it might be oil preventing their revival is pretty convincing. She referred to the near-shore vertebrate predator study, begun in 1995. It looked at sea otters, river otters, ducks and guillemots, and attempted to establish whether oil, food or population demographics were inhibiting recovery.
“Food does not appear to be an issue,” Ballachey said. “We determined that reproduction was not a problem. And that left the question, was it oil still affecting the animals?
“We looked at bio-markers for seven species between 1995 and 1999 and found there was evidence of continued (oil) exposure. River otters were the only species that showed no exposure.
“Sea otters, by their foraging habits, excavate clams mainly from the sediments, and when they do that, they are at risk if they are getting their prey on beaches that are still contaminated.”
Ballachey said that when she and her team simulate clam digs, usually they do not find oil, or the find insignificant amounts of it. But they have found evidence of liver lesions in otter carcasses and have determined, aging carcasses by their teeth, that animals born after the spill are dying in unusual numbers in heavily oiled areas.
“We suspect there is a chronic, low-level exposure and that has altered the health of the animals just a little bit,” she said. “It’s a tough life out there in the winter, and the extra stress (of oil in the diet) could be sufficient to cause more mortality. It all fits into a pretty good story, but we haven’t been able to nail down those links firmly.”
And that’s why Harwell said the research falls short: “The question is, if the subsurface oil residues existed and had a sufficient concentration of the toxic components, and an exposure route that could get to sea otters, would the exposure and health effects be sufficient to cause a delay in recovery?”
Harwell said no.
“The results are that there were orders of magnitude below (the level of) exposure necessary to cause effects on an individual sea otter, and therefore too low to affect population and reproductivity,” he said.
Scientists have also noted reduced populations in two pods of orcas in the sound. The AB pod, which lives year-round in the sound, feeding on fish, numbered 36 whales in 1989 and was seen swimming through heavily oiled water just days after the spill. A few days later, seven pod members were missing, never to be seen again. Six more disappeared over the winter of 1989-1990.  The pod has been slow to recover its numbers.
The AT1 pod, which has roamed from the south shore of the Kenai Peninsula to the inner waters of Prince William Sound for thousands of years, dropped from 22 whales to 13 over the first winter after the spill. Between 1990 and 1991, two more whales died.
A 2008 study concluded that the Exxon Valdez spill accelerated the AT1 pod’s path to eventual extinction and was likely the cause of the AB pod deaths—although without carcasses a firm connection cannot be drawn—and was likely contributing to the group’s slow recovery.
“Certainly there was a lot a lot of toxic material dumped into the sound and things started to unravel shortly thereafter,” said Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska Anchorage professor who is a specialist on the marine environment of the sound and was an adviser to the Trustee Council.
But Harwell said it is important to consider the possibility that stressors other than oil are causing the population depressions, including climate and oceanographic variability, increased tourism and shipping, invasive species and over-exploitation of marine resources.
“You can’t just look at the exposure side and know that there is risk, and on the other hand, you can’t just look at the health effects and know that there is exposure,” he said. “You have to look at attributable risk. Just because you see an effect on something doesn’t mean it is caused by a specific agent.”
Harwell said natural variability in ecosystems is pretty high.
“I think it’s easy to assume that any lingering effect (of the spill) would be lost in the noise and be trivial compared to natural variability,” he said. “The data are so sparse it’s hard to make a case.
The ExxonMobil Web site statement is more blunt: “Although trustee researchers present cartoon depictions of how residual oil could reach these species and thus lead to vague claims of lingering injury to consumer species, our field research examining potential oil contamination in numerous intertidal and fish species confirms the lack of any such contamination. These data strongly support our position of a fully recovered Prince William Sound.”

The Human Impact
It wasn’t just lower-order animal species that were affected by the Exxon Valdez spill. The impact on humans was also devastating. Although no one died as a direct cause of the spill, many people—commercial fishermen, charter-fishing operators, fish processing workers—lost their livelihoods when fishing was suspended for several seasons and some fish stocks crashed. Subsistence fishermen were forced to buy food to replace the fish that normally comprised the majority of their diets.
The stress of the financial effects resulted in mental health problems, divorces, family breakdown and a few suicides, according to Dr. Steven Picou, an Alabama psychologist who has been collecting data in Cordova since 1989.
“Like most technological disasters, it had severe and lasting community impacts,” Picou said. “I’ve seen a breakdown in social relationships, severe levels of depression, indicators of post-traumatic stress disorder, anger, self-isolation, and these are all characteristics reflective of the corrosive community. This is a very common situation, seen in many other communities hit by contamination or a technological accident.”
Picou was hired to direct a social intervention program in the area and, between 1995 and 1997, he partnered with local groups to establish peer listeners and talking circles in Cordova, Tatitlek and Chenega Bay—an effort he said led to a significant decrease in levels of stress in the community.”
But then, he said, while the immediate effects of the oil damage began to subside, a new stressor arose for local residents: litigation over the spill.
“It has been very adversarial litigation and I found people were suffering from litigation fatigue, uncertainty about the future, stress from perpetually having to fill out forms and claims and submit documentation to courts and wait for it to end,” he said. “It’s ironic that the very mechanism designed to provide some closure actually became a significant part of the problem.”
Picou said a 2006 a community survey demonstrated that there was recovery occurring in Cordova, and that those with continuing mental health impacts were mainly people who were litigants in the case against ExxonMobil
“The litigation has continued and so has the problem,” he said.
Picou returned to Cordova last October to hold a peer-listening training update because he anticipated a resurgence of anxiety and anger when the final verdict in the lawsuit came down from the U.S. Supreme Court and community members finally began to receive checks from ExxonMobil. The oil company was originally ordered to pay $5 billion in punitive damages to fishermen and others harmed by the spill, but after nearly two decades of appeals and haggling, the judgment was reduced to $507.5 million. That meant some plaintiffs who once stood to pocket tens of thousands ended up with a few thousand dollars.
Picou expected the end of the 20-year wait for resolution, and disappointment over the amount, would have serious implications.
“As people think about their futures and the futures of their children and look back on 20 years of missing income, the issues can arise all over again,” he said.
But Picou is optimistic.
“Some people were very upset and probably shocked by the ruling, but at the same time it is finally over and they have strong values and relationships in the community that will see them through,” he said. “There is a lot of resilience there.”

Lessons Learned
While the Exxon Valdez spill was an ecological disaster of a magnitude previously unseen in the United States, some good has come of it. Harwell, the ecological assessment consultant, said the science of ecosystems has greatly benefited from what researchers have observed in Prince William Sound.
“We learned a lot of lessons about how ecosystems recover and how to assess recovery, how to quantify a system’s responses to stress, dealing with climate change effects and how they affect ecosystems,” he said. “When we first started developing an ecological risk assessment framework we realized human health risk assessment tools were inadequate for ecological assessments. With an ecosystem, unlike people, it is not so easy to know what’s healthy and unhealthy. Prince William Sound has been an interesting place to study that.”
For the layperson, one benefit that’s easy to see is the protected habitat that has resulted from the spill. Over the past 20 years, the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council has spent more than $370 million of ExxonMobil’s settlement money to help purchase more than 647,000 acres of land in the oil-affected area, and that land is designated as habitat, where ecosystems will be spared the effects of logging, oil drilling and natural resource development.
Oil spill response technology has also greatly improved based on lessons learned in the sound, Steiner said, and at the end of this year the last single-hulled oil tanker operating in Prince William Sound will be retired—“Ironically, it is the sister ship to the Exxon Valdez,” Steiner said—and oil producers and shippers worldwide are in the process of phasing out single-hull tankers for safer, double-hulled versions.
“(The spill) had a lot of tentacles out into the way shipping operates throughout the world,” Steiner said.
On the human side, focusing on the positives can help the healing continue, Picou said.
“Hopefully, in the long run, we won’t let this occur again, and hopefully we can learn from this,” he said.

Rebecca Luczycki is senior editor of Alaska magazine.

Click here to see scientiests finding oil from the 1989 spill, still in Prince William Sound today. 

Click here to see historical news coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.