Last week the United States issued a report that was meant to justify the settlement but instead aggravated the confusion and controversy. The destruction from the slick was said to be greater than believed. For example, up to 5,500 sea otters may have died. Yet two federal biologists who took part in the work told me privately that half that number would be more accurate. The otter study, and a compilation of scientific studies covering killer whales, eagles, salmon, etc., were summarized for the public but not explained. Technical methods and data were withheld as “litigation-sensitive.”
Why all the confusion? It began within days of the accident, with the launching of the damage-assessment research. Since damages translate into dollars, and since it was apparent that the dollars could be huge–the settlement was for $1.1 billion–the cooperation and candor that are normal among researchers were soon crippled.
Whether working for Exxon or for a government agency on the other side, the oceanographers, chemists and biologists have endured a painful two years. Gag orders have made treason of their scholarly chats. Yet preliminary findings have been publicized or manipulated when it has suited their bosses to do so. A prominent biochemist was chagrined by the press release Alaska authorities issued last summer about his investigation of hydrocarbon exposure in certain intertidal species. The state’s motive was to keep the heat on Exxon to continue the cleanup. “My results were preliminary, and their conclusions weren’t scientific,” the researcher said. “I was too trusting.”
At meetings in the plush conference rooms of law firms, men and women who are lucky to earn $50,000 a year have performed for scientific illiterates who make that much in a month. Researchers tend to be diffident, and they need their jobs. In my view they have plugged along admirably, like beavers that rebuild after each disruption.
The settlement, if it stands, may eventually break the scientific logjam. But for now Exxon and the state are withholding details of their own findings–studies of fish, for example, or of the tainted intertidal habitat–until hundreds of outstanding lawsuits are resolved. Eskimo villagers, fishermen, fish processors, lovers of nature-all want compensation for their losses from the spill.
Then there are the national conservation groups, whom you’d expect to be allied with science. They have long demanded that the damage-assessment studies be aired for the good of the public. But their motives aren’t so pure. The spill presented them with a plum from heaven which could be energetically exploited. Donations to environmental groups surged in the wake of the accident. The disaster helped them win a delay in oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. By the very hypothesis of the government’s inquiry, and by the counterhypothesis driving Exxon’s research, environmentalists know they will gain much useful information if and when the secret data can be sprung. I am convinced that many wish to find a worst-case scenario, a picture of an ecosystem ruined for years. They want more tar for splatting Exxon, but they can’t afford to gather the proof themselves. So for now they’ll be content with summarized reports.
At one point last year Defenders of Wildlife, a national group, raised a belated challenge to the estimated size of the spill. Early on, the parties had agreed on a total of between 10.8 million and 10.9 million gallons. The figure represents the difference between the Valdez’s original cargo and what was measured in her tanks afterward. Yet Defenders has been saying that many more millions had escaped. When I questioned a biologist with Defenders, he lacked substantiation. But why, you might ask, should the spill’s size matter now? Because the more oil loosed, the stronger the case for lasting injury to wildlife.
I trust that this question of iffy oil volumes rings a bell. For I have just returned from a month’s assignment for Audubon Magazine in the Persian Gulf. The reputed size of that spill, if you tracked the numbers, diminished from 40 times the size of the Valdez spill to six times, or roughly 1.5 billion barrels. I can tell you that early in the crisis U.S. scientists had arrived at the lower volume. Why didn’t their assessment come out sooner? Not because of lawyers. This time the military controlled the researchers.
Saddam, you see, had to be painted as the epochal ecoterrorist. The spigot of crude bore the mother of all spills. Environmental groups, having warned of the worst before the war began, extended the apocalyptic line. Odd bedfellows, the brass and the dugong-huggers stonewalled the emerging truth. Mafi Mishkella, as the Arabs say:no problem. Let’s show Saddam to be the criminal he is. I’m a dugong-hugger myself. But why trample on science too?
P.S. Ugly oil smears the Saudi coast, but no dugongs have died. And in Alaska, where I have been teasing out data and walking beaches for almost two years, Prince William Sound has nearly recovered. Certainly she will be fully healthy by the time it is fully revealed how she was ill.
