How Long Did It Take To Clean Up Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
Recovery Timeline
The tanker Exxon Valdez spilled near 11 meg gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989, injuring 28 types of animals, plants, and marine habitats. How long has it taken them to recover from this spill? Twenty-v years later, which ones have not recovered? Here is a timeline showing when natural resources were alleged officially "recovered," through bodily recovery could have occurred earlier than this official designation from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council. Click/tap on the map for a larger view | Download this graphic
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In this podcast, we talk with NOAA marine biologist Gary Shigenaka to detect out how marine life is faring in Prince William Sound today. We too await at lessons we might learn from this environmental disaster in low-cal of growing oil exploration and shipping traffic in the Arctic.
Transcript
[SHIP RADIO] "Yeah, this is Valdez. We've ... should be on your radar at that place. We've fetched upward, hard aground, north of Goose Island off Bligh Reef and ... plainly ... leaking some oil ... "
[NARRATOR] That radio call was made on March 24th, 1989. An oil tanker had struck Bligh Reef in Alaska's Prince William Audio. Information technology was the starting time of one of the biggest environmental disasters in U.South. history. This is Making Waves from NOAA's National Ocean Service. I'chiliad Troy Kitch. In today's evidence, the Exxon Valdez oil spill—twenty-five years later. Later the Exxon Valdez spilled nearly 11 million gallons of rough oil into the sea, a squad of NOAA scientists arrived on-scene to provide scientific support during the long make clean-upward. Biologist Gary Shigenaka was a member of that team. The Exxon Valdez was his showtime introduction to working on a big oil spill for NOAA.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "It changed the course of my career and peradventure even my life and it really divers the challenges of agreement ecology disturbance in a complex setting like Prince William Sound."
[NARRATOR] That's Gary, and he's with united states today past phone from his Seattle office where he works every bit a biologist in NOAA's Response and Restoration office. He said that part of what fabricated this spill unique was not but its size, but that it happened in such a remote place. There just weren't any response avails that could quickly be called up to go clean up the oil:
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "... similar vessels, airplanes, and people and specialized pieces of gear similar containment smash. Prior to that other recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon, it was the largest spill to occur in U.S. waters and information technology was a benchmark in a lot of ways. The shortcomings that were identified during the initial and longer-term response resulted in major changes to U.S. constabulary, primarily expressed in a slice of legislation known every bit the Oil Pollution Human action of 1990."
[NARRATOR] That law led to things similar making sure we were more than prepared and better trained to deal with spills, prepositioning equipment around the nation, and requiring all oil tankers in the U.S. to have double hulls -- but these changes only tell part of the story. The kind of change we're going to talk about for the rest of the testify doesn't involve improvements in ship hull pattern, new laws, or better training ... it involves nature. And how scientists try to figure out what's going on in nature. Twenty-five years later ... how is this remote region of Alaska faring? That's a question that we'll encounter is not and so piece of cake to answer. Remember when Gary said that this spill defined the challenges of understanding environmental disturbance in a complex setting? What exactly does that mean? Well, he said Prince William Sound is a very complex ecosystem, a place with gravely intertidal areas, glaciers, and exotic wildlife like whales, salmon, and body of water otters. And, above all, it'due south a region where the surroundings is constantly in flux. This expanse changes rapidly from year to yr.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "Our monitoring program afterwards the spill really showed how variable the Prince William Sound marine surroundings is even without a disturbance like the spill. So this is looking at what we phone call the unoiled, what nosotros phone call the 'control sites,' and this inherent variability has translated into big challenges for tracking the betoken of the spill, especially subsequently the get-go twelvemonth or 2 later it begins to fade a fiddling flake, then it'south get harder to separate the signal of the spill from the inherent groundwork variability that is characteristic for Prince William Audio. Basically, if things are irresolute a lot at the sites y'all're monitoring and information technology isn't linked to the oil spill, you know, how do yous define when things are back to 'normal,' in quotes I approximate that would be."
[NARRATOR] Calculation to this 'inherent variability,' at that place was something else to consider.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "And the other thing that fabricated it unique at the time of the spill was the fact that it really was still recovering from another major disturbance that happened exactly 25 years before the Exxon Valdez and that was the Great Alaskan earthquake, which was one of the largest that's been recorded to date. And nosotros can really focus in on Prince William Audio because Prince William Sound was one of the nearly impacted areas in Alaska. There were places that were uplifted every bit much as 30 feet during that particular earthquake. And so you can imagine the shorelines changed really radically. So and then we would take a human being event superimposed on a big-scale natural event. And then information technology'south a complex kind of pic."
[NARRATOR] And so given all of these variables, can we actually say anything well-nigh how fish, animals, and plants are recovering from the spill? Gary said in some cases, yep. Just it oft depends on knowing what conditions were similar earlier the spill happened.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "Whenever we have a spill or when we're trying to assess the touch of whatever action or disturbance on an environment in question, we always ask, 'well, what were things like beforehand.' And for oil spills, we rarely know. In the case of the Exxon Valdez, there was one exception, and it'southward proved to be important."
[NARRATOR] The exception was a monitoring plan of orcas that had been ongoing in the Sound for at to the lowest degree five years before the spill.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "That pre-spill information showed that something in 1989 drastically reduced the numbers of orcas in 2 groups that frequents Prince William Audio and that'southward something that'southward mostly unheard of in generally stable populations of big marine mammals. So the continuing monitoring afterwards the spill has shown a very disturbing recovery pattern. One not and so disturbing: one group of orca whales in Prince William Sound is slowly recovering, but the other group of orcas is declining towards extinction. So that kind of demonstrates what the value is of pre-spill data, but once more, it's very rarely available, and then the next best thing that we've got for comparing oiled or cleaned site weather condition to those of unoiled sites is to look at comparable sites that were not subject to the touch on, in this case the oil spill."
[NARRATOR] After the spill, other long-term monitoring studies were started, some of which are still ongoing to this twenty-four hour period. One study looked at how the gravel and rocky shorelines along the Sound recovered from some of the more aggressive clean-up methods used to remove oil. Were shorelines more damaged by the make clean up than the oil lone? The answer: yep. Simply the flip side is that these beaches too recovered quite quickly. And this points to a reality of cleaning up oil spills: information technology's oft nearly choosing between tradeoffs.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "There was more impairment, but the shoreline communities adequately speedily compensated for that additional damage and, within a twelvemonth or two, they were nearly at the same place, and then after iii or four years, most of the damage from both oil and clean upwards was gone. So we could say they were effectively recovered. And so yous put that into a clean up context and you attempt to determine what the tradeoffs are. Are yous willing to have that kind of a cost to go more than oil out of the environment, and that's something that happens all the time in terms of in making your choices for oil spill clean upward methods."
[NARRATOR] And so there are all the same things that scientific discipline tin can't still explain. I asked Gary what's virtually surprising today about this spill after and then many years.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "In that location's however pockets of oil in some places in Prince William Sound and along the Alaskan Peninsula and it'southward still relatively fresh. I don't think anyone actually expected that after 25 years and we don't fully understand why. I remember that's something that'll be of import to endeavour to figure out for the future."
[NARRATOR] Unexpected pockets of relatively fresh oil, gravel beaches that returned pretty much to normal after four or 5 years, animal populations that have recovered or are still trying to recover today...how practise scientists deal with then much often conflicting information? How can we know if changes or recovery times are due to the oil spill or if in that location are other factors at play? How do we know when an surface area is 'recovered?' This all points dorsum at what Gary says is the chief accept-away lesson later 25 years of studying the aftermath of this spill: the natural surround in Alaska and in the Chill are speedily changing. If we don't understand that groundwork change, than it's really difficult to say if an surface area has recovered or not after a large oil spill.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "I think nosotros demand to really keep in mind that maybe our prior notions of recovery as returning to some pre-spill or absolute control condition may be outmoded. We need to really overlay that with the dynamic changes that are occurring for whatsoever reason and adjust our assessments and definitions appropriately. I don't have the answers for the all-time manner to do that. We've gotten some ideas from the work that nosotros've done, but I think that as those changes brainstorm to accelerate and go much more marked, then information technology's going to exist harder to do."
[NARRATOR] And then given what we've heard and then far, 25 years later, is Prince William Sound mostly considered recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill?
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "No. There's a pretty robust research program that'due south been going on in Prince William Audio -- not just ours -- but a whole serial of research and monitoring activities and generally under the auspices of the Exxon Valdez oil spill trustee council."
[NARRATOR] He said that this grouping has been looking at a fixed set of resources for virtually the entire time that has passed since the spill.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "And slowly just surely, in that location list of impacted resource has been switching from one column, impacted, to another cavalcade, recovered. And most recently, they've moved a couple of persistent unrecovered resources -- and that would be sea otters and harlequin ducks—from the 'not recovered' column to the 'recovered' cavalcade. And then that's good news but we've still got a scattering of resources that remain in the 'not recovered' column, including the orcas I mentioned. The short answer to the question, I call up, is because not everything has moved over to the recovered column, and so y'all can't actually say that Prince William Sound has recovered.
[NARRATOR] But, he added, Prince William Audio has made a lot of progress over the past two and a one-half decades.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "Information technology's in some means encouraging to run across that the environment can rebound from something similar a major oil spill, but it is still a niggling distressing that we can't merely say 25 years afterward the fact that things have recovered completely."
[NARRATOR] Gary attributed most of that progress in ecology restoration not to man efforts, simply to the resiliency of nature.
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "Nature has pretty much on its ain—I hateful we did some good with the make clean up but the estimates of how much oil that our make clean up efforts removed from the environment versus the amount of oil that was naturally degraded or removed from the environment, it's pretty discouraging in terms of the calibration of the efforts that we posed during the spill. It comes out somewhere between 10-15 percent of the total oil spilled was recovered by our make clean upwardly efforts. And so the natural environment pretty much does the job on its own. We can assist a piddling fleck, and I think we can brand a large difference for highly sensitive areas, but for the almost part we're just a footnote to oil spill clean upwards from the environment overall."
[NARRATOR] So what we know is that things have improved over time since the spill in Prince William Sound, just it's hard to quantify because the environs is changing and then quickly and in so many ways. This variability and rapid change is perhaps most profound in the Arctic. And equally the Chill continues to warm and the prospect of more human activity in this region seems inevitable -- recollect shipping and oil exploration—what tin can Exxon Valdez teach us?
[GARY SHIGENAKA] "Well I think, for the states, the very concept of an oil spill in the Arctic is scary and in that location'due south a lot of reasons for that. First of all, it's obviously really a difficult surround to work in because of the weather, so logistically, too as culturally. So if you thought that Prince William Audio was remote, and so responding to a spill in the Arctic would be almost similar working on the moon. Just as well from an cess perspective, the Arctic is kind of on the leading edge of some of the well-nigh rapid and radical changes that are taking place in the natural world. People who live in that area talk about the absence of long-term water ice -- the old ice that used to exist a part of their environment or the fact that their cellars that they use as natural refrigerators and freezers now are melting and flooding. So the Arctic communities are really bellwethers for the changes that occurring related to climate change and a lot of the other large-scale influences that are taking identify because of human influences. And then that'southward really going to bear upon our ability to characterize impact and recovery for the same reasons that it'due south difficult to do a identify similar Prince William Sound from the Exxon Valdez."
[NARRATOR] That was Gary Shigenaka, marine biologist with the Emergency Response Division of NOAA's Role of Response and Restoration. This is Making Waves from NOAA's National Ocean Service. Subscribe to u.s.a. in and get out us some feedback almost what you think of the bear witness. We'll return in a few weeks with a new episode.
Source: https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/podcast/mar14/mw122-exxonvaldez.html
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