The True Price of Oil

By Ashley Shelby, AlterNet. Posted June 24, 2005.

Shortly after the catastrophic 1989 Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Exxon sent Don Cornett, the company's top official in Alaska at the time, to the fishing port of Cordova to reassure the fishers that the company would make things right.

"You have my word," Cornett told them then. "I said it, Don Cornett. We will do whatever it takes to keep you whole. We do business straight."

No one in Cordova's Masonic Lodge tonight, where attorney Brian O'Neill has called a town meeting, has forgotten that promise, and no one has failed to notice that things haven't exactly worked out that way. O'Neill, a lawyer with the Minneapolis firm Faegre & Benson and the head of the legal team on this case, has, for ten years, returned to Cordova regularly to update his clients on the progress of the civil case against Exxon.

At this meeting, a man walks in late. He pours himself a cup of coffee and stands back near the kitchen, listening to his neighbors talk about how they now consider their wives' health insurance plans dowries and how the new definition of a high-liner is a fisherman whose wife has a good job. He listens to as much as he seems able, then turns to O'Neill and says, "Where in the hell is my money? That's what I want to focus on. If any of us knew we'd be having this meeting fourteen years later, we'd have liquidated and moved out. Maybe we should have." The man's name is Phil Lian, and in 1988 he was one of the most successful fishers and businessmen in Cordova, fishing the Sound and selling supplies to Cordova's fleet. His business was growing at 80 percent a year, and grossing two million dollars a year. But after the spill, no one needed supplies because no one was going fishing. Today, his empty fishing supply superstore, across the road from the Cordova Fisherman's Memorial, is a Dickensian symbol of loss and matters left unresolved.

"We're going to get the award," O'Neill says. "In regards to your anger --"

"I don't like to call it anger," Lian says sharply. "I like to call it frustration."

"Well hell, I'm angry!" O'Neill shouts.

The story of Cordova is not just a sad tale of a few bad fishing seasons. It is the story of how corporations that are, in the words of Brian O'Neill, "nation-states unto themselves", can use the legal system and the seeming apathy of the federal government to bring an entire town to its knees through endless litigation funded by bottomless resources. Cordova, a beautiful but gritty fishing port of 2600, was once a town of high-liners, a term reserved for the most successful commercial fishers, men and women who might have brought in a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, if not more. Today, people in Cordova will tell you there isn't a single fisher in town who would be considered a high-liner by pre-spill standards. Once an exuberant, successful port town filled with old families and big money, Cordova is now a depressed small town where former high-liners mend nets in cannery warehouses and bartenders fill and re-fill beer glasses. If the herring fishery had been closed one, maybe even two seasons, fishers say, they might have been able to bounce back; but there hasn't been a herring season for more than ten years. It has also been ten years since a federal jury awarded the fishers and Natives on the Sound $5.2 billion in punitive damages from Exxon. And it has been ten years that not a single check from that award has been cut. Yet the story of Cordova is not important simply because of the details of the Exxon case; what is at stake in this unprecedented litigation are the concept of corporate responsibility and the way the U.S. legal system can be used by large companies to avoid it.

“The system has failed them”

On March 24th, 1989, Captain Joseph Hazelwood, who had been treated for alcoholism, stepped onto the oil tanker Exxon Valdez having consumed, according to him, three vodkas on the rocks at various bars in the port city of Valdez. O'Neill, however, filed affidavits from bartenders claiming the captain drank the equivalent of five doubles, or, in the words of the Court of Appeals, enough to make most people unconscious. The spill eventually spread down 1200 miles of coastline.

The environmental damage was catastrophic. Cleanup crews watched in horror as otters scratched out their own eyes to rid them of oil. U.S. Department of Justice teams recovered the carcasses of more than 36,000 migratory birds and a thousand sea otters, and believe these numbers represent only a fraction of the actual numbers.

For a few months after the Exxon Valdez leaked eleven million gallons of oil into the Sound, the disaster was imprinted on the national consciousness. But as time passed, it was reduced to a few stubborn media images: an oiled otter, a tar-covered seagull, men in haz-mat suits spraying boulders with boiling water. An out-of-work commercial fisherman was never among the emblems. And now, fifteen years have passed since the disaster, fifteen years during which the fishers of Cordova have been trying -- and failing -- to survive the spill.

"They are very different and very wonderful," O'Neill says of his clients, nearly all of them Sound fishers or Alaska native Indians. "They're good people, people who are comfortable moving off the grid." But fifteen years off the grid has taken its toll in Cordova-and on O'Neill. "They see me as part of a system that's failed them."

Ashley Shelby is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her first book, "Red River Rising: Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City," was published in April 2004. This article originally appeared in The Nation.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Environment! Sign up now »