Twenty years later the impacts of the 'Exxon Valdez' linger

“On the whole, if you look at the long view of history,” said Aldo Chircop, a maritime law expert at Dalhousie Law School in Halifax, “the Valdez spill has pushed standards up”.

The International Maritime Organization eventually followed the US lead, acting to phase out single-hulled oil tankers between 2010 and 2015. But it did so only after Europe’s own versions of the Valdez spill. The tanker Erika sank in 1999, coating French beaches, and the Prestige split up at sea in 2002, spreading heavy fuel oil onto Spanish coasts.

About 300 single-hulled tankers remain on the high seas, including the patched Exxon Valdez, renamed the Sea River Mediterranean. It is prohibited from entering Prince William Sound.

Exxon insists it has done its duty by paying US$3.8 billion in cleanup costs and damages. The company reached a settlement with the state and federal governments in 1991 and paid nearly US$1 billion, mostly for habitat and restoration programs. In addition, it has paid more than US$2 billion in cleanup costs and another US$507 million to compensate 11,000 fishermen, landowners, and businesses for their losses.

But in a class-action suit by about 32,000 plaintiffs, ranging from cannery workers to native Alaskans, a jury decided in 1994, that Exxon should pay punitive damages equal to about a year’s worth of Exxon’s profits, or US$5 billion.

Exxon balked and embarked on a long-running legal battle. In 2006, a federal appeals court cut the award to US$2.5 billion. Exxon appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing the punitive damages were excessive and a “windfall” to the plaintiffs. In a decision that set legal precedent in maritime law, the Supreme Court last June ruled 5-3 that punitive awards should not exceed actual damages, effectively limiting Exxon’s additional liability to US$507 million.

“What industry learned is all they have to do is stall and they can get the Supreme Court to let them wiggle out of the punitive damages,” said Riki Ott, a marine biologist whose career in commercial fishing ended with the spill.

Melanie Duchin, a Greenpeace co-ordinator in Anchorage, said, “Most Alaskans are in favour of resource development. But there still is a lot of outrage with Exxon about how the plaintiffs had to wait to get such small punitive damages. There is a very bad taste in people’s mouths about Exxon.”

For many years Exxon has minimised the effects of the spill. In a statement last week responding to queries on the 20th anniversary, the company asserted that “there has been no long-term damage caused by the spilled oil,” adding, “The ecosystem in Prince William Sound today is healthy, robust and thriving”.

Exxon said it employed 13,000 people in the clean-up effort. But the dramatic scenes of hired workers washing oil off beaches turned out to be images of futility. Ott, who has written about the spill, says she can dig a hole in a beach on the sound and watch as it fills with oil. A 2001 federal survey found that oil remained on or under more than half the sound’s beaches.

Estimates of the total amount of oil that remains in the environment have varied, but the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, a government-created monitor, concluded that the oil disappears at less than 4 per cent per year. At that rate, the council said, the oil will “take decades and possibly centuries to disappear entirely”.

Since the spill, Prince William Sound has been among the most intensively studied of environments. But the more scientists have learned, the less they realise they understand how different species have been affected.