Asphalt by Kenneth O'Reilly;

Author:Kenneth O'Reilly; [O'Reilly, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT038000 Nature / Natural Resources, BUS032000 Business & Economics / Infrastructure, HIS037000 History / World
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

8

Overburden

The Oil-Sand Century

On March 24, 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling at least eleven million gallons and fouling 11,000 square miles of seawater and 1,300 miles of shoreline. VECO, the primary cleanup contractor, purchased 530 miles of toilet paper (“if unrolled”) for the labor force.1 With such other helpers as one thousand U.S. military personnel, Exxon burned the spilled oil and attacked it with dispersants, high-pressure hoses, and manual labor. Having scrubbed oil from sea otters and rocks, many cleanup workers developed health problems. Other spill-associated damage cascaded through native villages and fisheries.

The Exxon Valdez skipper, Joseph Hazelwood, had a backstory of asphalt and alcohol. An excellent sailor when sober, he once saved the Exxon Chester, an asphalt tanker caught in a severe storm while heading down the East Coast. When the Exxon Valdez met Bligh Reef, Hazelwood was not on the bridge, having turned piloting over to his third mate (who lacked a piloting license). Given a blood-alcohol level of 0.061 percent ten hours after the collision, Hazelwood’s lawyers said he began drinking in his cabin because he knew that his career was over. Two days before the spill’s first anniversary, an Anchorage jury found Hazelwood not guilty of three felony charges, including operating a vessel while under the influence of alcohol. The jury found him guilty of negligent discharge of oil, a misdemeanor. In 1992 an Alaska court vacated the conviction because the Clean Water Act of 1972 granted immunity to anyone who reported a spill, and Hazelwood had done so. Exxon succeeded in reducing a jury award in a civil lawsuit from $5 billion to $500 million. The company settled a federal lawsuit for $900 million.

The Exxon Valdez cleanup recovered no more than 10 percent of the spilled oil. Some of the remaining oil lost its lighter fractions over time, leaving behind a substance as close to asphalt as anything else. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council calculated a ten-acre spread of oil “remain[ing] in surface sediments . . . primarily in the form of highly weathered, asphalt-like or tar deposits.” Oil remained in acreage beyond those ten, trapped in “subsurface, intertidal areas . . . not easily exposed to natural weathering processes.” In 2014, two years after the Oriental Nicely (née Exxon Valdez) beached for dismantling in India, the Trustee Council said that “200 tons of oil might still exist” in Prince William Sound. That oil will degrade at a “very slow” rate and someday leave behind no trace beyond asphalt.2

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