Oil Spills Alaska

Drew Sparlin has been spending his days in a 40-foot boat on the choppy waters of Cook Inlet, doing something hundreds of other commercial fishermen in this part of Alaska can only think about this year. He's been fishing. Sparlin's boat, the Lady Lee, is one of a half-dozen vessels leaving the fishing port of Kenai every day in search of migrating salmon--and globs of floating oil--as part of a test to see how much oil is in the fishing grounds of Central Cook Inlet.

The cost of repairing the trans-Alaska pipeline and cleaning up a 286,000-gallon oil spill caused by a bullet hole has risen to $20 million, according to Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. In October, Daniel Carson Lewis allegedly shot a hole in the pipeline north of Fairbanks with a .338-caliber rifle. He will stand trial in September. The cleanup has almost been completed, officials said.

In the hush just before dawn on a remote Alaskan shore, all that can be heard is the tiptoe of the wind through spruce trees and the moan of ocean waves bowing before the rocks. Then it ends. "Rise and shine, happy campers! Breakfast!" Benn Levine is good natured in his summons. But he means business.

The toll of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is a sadly familiar one: 250,000 dead birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals--all victims of the oil tanker that ran over a reef late one April night and drained 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. There are others whom almost no one talks about, although unlike the birds, most of them are still alive. They are the people who scraped oil off the beaches, skimmed it off the top of the water, hosed it off rocks.

Nine years after his conviction for illegally spilling oil in pristine Alaska waters, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood started his punishment Monday on the litter patrol. Hazelwood, former skipper of the tanker Exxon Valdez, spent the day loading a truck with abandoned auto parts and assorted junk thrown along the roadsides of Anchorage. He worked with one other man and a supervisor.

Unpublished studies by state and federal researchers contend that the true cost of environmental damage from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska could be as high as $15 billion, according to experts familiar with the secret reports. The figure stands in dramatic contrast to the $1.125-billion settlement that Exxon Corp. agreed to last week to settle criminal and civil complaints brought by the state of Alaska and the federal government. Alaska Gov. Walter J.

A Coast Guard administrative law judge in Seattle stripped for nine months the license of the officer who was on the bridge when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Alaska, causing the nation's worst oil spill. Judge Roscoe Wilkes bypassed the standard three- to six-month sentence for Gregory Cousins, and said the massive oil spill called for more severe punishment.

ARCO Juneau was tied up at Berth 5 of the Alyeska Marine Terminal, hungrily suckling nearly 3.5 million gallons of North Slope crude each hour from the Trans Alaska pipeline. It was dusk in the land of the midnight sun, and Capt. Greg Knowlton, 37, was ready for bed after a 17-hour watch. Tomorrow would be another long day as his 883-foot tanker left Valdez through Prince William Sound to bring its 350-million-gallon cargo to refineries near Seattle. Once at sea, however, Knowlton's job would settle into routine and tedium.

Prices at the gas pump in Los Angeles showed signs of stabilizing Wednesday as the first Atlantic Richfield tanker from Alaska to reach California since the March 24 oil spill prepared to dock today in Long Beach and more crude oil and gasoline steamed this way from other ports.

Refinery worker Walter Blusewicz has noticed a change in Exxon Corp.'s attitude in the year since one of its tankers disgorged 10.9 million gallons of crude oil into the waters off Alaska. From the highest corporate levels to the smallest detail, Exxon is scrutinizing every operation with an eye toward improving its environmental and safety record to prevent additional accidents, he said.

Crews installed a clamp over a bullet hole in the trans-Alaska pipeline, finally stopping a leak that over three days spewed 285,600 gallons of oil onto the wilderness 75 miles north of Fairbanks. A man who had been drinking shot the pipeline with a hunting rifle in what the governor called "a harebrained act of violence." The pipeline, which carries about 17% of the nation's oil production, had to be shut down.

Workers have cleaned up nearly a third of the diesel spilled by a sunken fishing vessel into Prince William Sound, the largest spill there since the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, officials said Tuesday. Fuel began leaking Saturday when a fishing boat hit a rocky ledge 400 yards offshore and sank in about 1,000 feet of water. About 35,000 gallons of diesel--the entire contents of the boat's fuel tanks--have spilled.

A fishing boat loaded with 12,000 gallons of diesel fuel burst into flames off Cold Bay, Alaska, prompting the U.S. Coast Guard to monitor the waters for spillage. Five crew members were hoisted off the 140-foot American Star, which burned throughout the day. The cause was unknown.

Nine years after his conviction for illegally spilling oil in pristine Alaska waters, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood started his punishment Monday on the litter patrol. Hazelwood, former skipper of the tanker Exxon Valdez, spent the day loading a truck with abandoned auto parts and assorted junk thrown along the roadsides of Anchorage. He worked with one other man and a supervisor.

A federal appeals court will hear arguments Monday that the jury that awarded more than $5 billion in damages in the Exxon Valdez oil spill was tainted by a bailiff who pulled out his gun and joked about putting a holdout juror "out of her misery." The same juror, who attempted suicide three weeks after the verdict, alleged she was threatened by other jurors and by the bailiff, who was forced to resign from the U.S.

A year after the Exxon Valdez ground onto a reef in the middle of a frigid March night in 1989, unleashing the worst environmental disaster in U.S history, a striking thing happened. Amid oil-blinded sea otters and beached whales and the limp black carcasses of 250,000 shorebirds came the slow, sure swim of the pink salmon. The 1990 run was 44.5 million fish, the highest on record, almost four times higher than the year before 11 million gallons of oil spilled into Prince William Sound.

Exxon Valdez Third Mate Gregory Cousins testified Wednesday in his former skipper's trial that the tanker ran aground for one reason--the helmsman failed to execute steering orders given by Cousins. Cousins said he is convinced that the Exxon Valdez would have missed Bligh Reef by 2 miles if the orders of Capt. Joseph Hazelwood, who has since been fired, had been carried out.

Settlement money from the Exxon Valdez oil spill will be used to buy 42,000 acres on Afognak Island to protect bald eagles and marbled murrelets, two bird species hit hard by the 1989 tanker accident. The $38.7-million purchase approved by the Exxon Oil Spill Settlement Council stops logging near Seal Bay in the island's northeast corner to protect the birds' habitat. The state will own the land.

Oil from the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez supertanker in Prince William Sound will kill or stunt Alaskan pink salmon for generations to come, government scientists say. "Those buried oil pockets are sort of like land mines," said Jeffrey Short, a scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. The service's researchers presented their findings at a conference in Anchorage. Despite a massive cleanup of the 10.

Money linked to the devastating Exxon Valdez oil spill that fouled Alaska shorelines will be used to clean up another oil-tainted coastline--the Bolsa Chica wetlands. Those drafting the public purchase of Bolsa Chica learned Thursday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will contribute $400,000 set aside from a settlement reached after the devastating 1989 Exxon spill. The money is part of a much larger sum the oil giant paid the U.S.