Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (3 page)

B
y Saturday, Exxon executives estimated that 240,000 barrels of crude had poured into Prince William Sound, more than had ever been dumped into American waters at one time. Television camera crews arrived in Valdez by the scores and beamed out images of saturated birds and blackened sea otters. The immediate damage to wildlife caused by a spill arises from direct contact with the oil while it is exposed on the water or the shore. A marine mammal such as an otter will lose vital insulation on the contaminated section of its fur, preen itself for relief, ingest the petroleum, and soon die. Nearly 1,000 sea otter carcasses appeared in Prince William Sound after the spill. Federal scientists never established an exact count of the total dead, but they estimated that about 2,800 sea otters perished. With their furry faces and pleading black eyes the otters became the symbols of a broader wildlife massacre. Scientists later estimated that about 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, 22 killer whales, 250,000 seabirds, and billions of salmon and herring eggs were destroyed by the initial exposure to
Exxon Valdez
oil.

On Saturday afternoon, March 25, Don Cornett, Exxon’s director of its office in Anchorage, a silver-haired veteran of the corporation, telephoned George Nelson, one of his counterparts at the pipeline consortium. Cornett would play a leading role in representing Exxon before the media and the public in the days and years ahead. His past assignments had included a stint as an environmental manager in the corporation’s marine department; he had experience with oil spills. He flew by chartered helicopter to Valdez and hit the telephones. He would later reflect that because of the chaotic flow of information, “it was hard to always make the right calls. . . . The emotions surrounding the damage to the mammals and the birds were totally understandable and totally unmanageable.” That Saturday, because he was calling from an emergency response center, his telephone line was recorded.

“Are you getting a lot of press contacts into your office?” Nelson asked him.

“Jesus Christ. I can’t get off the telephone.”

“I thought you probably were, but many, many hundreds of them—how many of them are down in Valdez? A whole bunch, aren’t there?”

“‘Yeah, yeah. Well, they’re taking some in Houston, some in New York, and I’m taking some here. . . . They’re getting prank calls.”

“They’re getting what?”

“Prank calls.”

“Like what?”

“‘You dirty bastard.’ . . . We’re getting those over here too,” Cornett said.

“Well, this is going to be a public relations nightmare.”

“Nightmare,” Cornett agreed.

“Nightmare, to say the least. Yes, to say the very least.”

“Do you know how I feel?”

“How?”

“Do you remember when Patton looked out over the battlefield and said, ‘God help me, I do love it so.’ . . . When they were going to invade Europe, he said, ‘God wouldn’t let this happen and not make me be in on it.’ That’s the way I feel.”
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L
ee R. Raymond, the president of Exxon Corporation and then its number-two executive, heard about the grounding of the
Exxon Valdez
while on company business in Jacksonville, Florida. Raymond had helped to design the ambitious reorganization plan that had eliminated more than 40 percent of the corporation’s employees in the years before the wreck. He was in Jacksonville because Lawrence Rawl had sent him there to scout real estate. As part of their campaign to remake Exxon, Rawl and Raymond had decided to move the company’s head office out of Manhattan; Jacksonville was a possible destination. As he absorbed the news from Alaska, Raymond said later, he was “chagrined . . . horrified and to an extent devastated.” His wife, Charlene, told him, “It’s the first time I have ever been embarrassed that we work for Exxon.”
¹⁴

Raymond was ill with a severe spring cold and could not fly for a few days, on doctor’s orders. Pent up in Jacksonville, restless, he began to assess the cause of the accident and to coordinate Exxon’s response. Raymond had grown up in Watertown, South Dakota. His father was a railroad engineer who drove trains between Watertown and Aberdeen. In high school the younger Raymond decided to study chemistry, particularly its mathematical aspects; he attended the University of Wisconsin as an undergraduate and ultimately earned a doctoral degree in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota as a National Science Foundation fellow and on other scholarships. He took his first job at Exxon and rose through the ranks. He could mist up when speaking about his father or the people who worked for him at Exxon. Normally, however, he did not come across as a sentimental man and could be a blunt and demanding manager. At the time of the spill he was fifty years old and had worked at Exxon for twenty-five years.

In time Raymond would draw a number of conclusions about the
Exxon Valdez.
One of his earliest assessments was that environmentalists and confused politicians in Alaska—particularly Alaska’s governor, Cowper—had prevented Exxon from reducing the effects of the disaster by refusing to allow the company to spray chemical dispersants on the oil slick during the first days, as provided for in a spill response plan previously filed by Exxon with the state. Chemical dispersants do not eliminate oil, but if applied correctly in favorable conditions, they can break up concentrations and drive oil droplets underwater. That can reduce the impact on birds and marine mammals that feed or travel at the surface. Chemically dispersed oil may also be less likely to wash up on beaches in dangerous concentrations. Oil driven beneath the surface might harm fish or other subsurface life, however. Fisheries were the most important source of income and employment in Prince William Sound. Also, several factors can limit the effectiveness of dispersants. The chemicals are less effective in cold waters than in warmer waters. They are typically released by aerial spraying. If the seas below are calm, as they were in Prince William Sound during the first days after the
Exxon Valdez
gashed itself on Bligh Reef, the chemicals may not churn and mix adequately. If the particular composition of spilled oil or the chemistry of the water is unknown, then the impact of dispersants may also be uncertain.

Chaos reigned around the decision makers on-site in Valdez on Friday and Saturday. Local fishermen arrived at hastily arranged press conferences at the town’s civic center, shouted questions, made speeches, and threatened to take the cleanup into their own hands. On the stage at the press conferences stood Exxon employees “wearing three-piece suits,” recalled Dennis Kelso, then in charge of Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation. Meanwhile, in the crowd, “there was so much fear and anger you could hear it crackling through the audience.”
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Valdez was a small and isolated town; local oil and government representatives struggled to make decisions while consulting with their superiors over long-distance telephone lines. There were multiple sources of overlapping authority: the Coast Guard, the state of Alaska, the pipeline consortium, and Exxon. British Petroleum, the lead owner of the pipeline consortium, Alyeska, was supposed to have ensured that preparations for response to an oil spill in the sound would be adequate, but the consortium had failed to equip tiny Valdez with adequate boats, vehicles, booms, leased aircraft, and other vital materials.

The Coast Guard had emergency procedures to respond to oil spills and had supervised cleanups in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, but it, too, lacked the equipment to take full charge in Prince William Sound. Exxon lacked the means as well, because it had been relying on the B.P.-led pipeline consortium. Exxon “had more experience,” as a senior Coast Guard officer put it, so the Coast Guard yielded to the corporation. Raymond later said that Exxon in fact had access to “a lot of cleanup equipment on the ground,” but he blamed Alaskan officials for not granting permission to use it. He also deflected any suggestion that his and Rawl’s decision to lay off Exxon’s oil spill specialists during their cost-cutting spree had hindered the corporation’s response: “We have people all over the world trained to handle oil spills, even if they don’t have the exact title of oil spill specialist.”

Fishermen in Valdez believed that spraying chemical dispersants would do more harm than good to salmon and other fish populations on which they depended. Hundreds of thousands of young salmon were about to be released into the sound at the start of their annual migration—if they swam through toxic oil driven beneath the surface by dispersants, they might be destroyed before they reached maturity. Locals voiced these fears to Steve Cowper and his advisers. Cowper authorized a few tests, which did not turn out promisingly—the chemicals were dumped accidentally onto cleanup crews. Coast Guard officers were not enthusiastic about using dispersants; neither Alaskan state officials nor Environmental Protection Agency specialists recommended going forward aggressively.

Lee Raymond fumed. Running limited experiments in these circumstances was “like testing the fire hose after the house is on fire,” he thought. He accepted that in cases where the chemistry of oil and water was unknown, a dispersant plan might best be implemented cautiously—but that was not the case here. “There is only one kind of crude on a vessel leaving Valdez,” he said later. He was referring to the fact that only well-known Alaska crude blends came down the pipeline and their chemistry had been well studied. “It is one of the most susceptible of all crude oils” to dispersants. “Therefore, that information didn’t need to be established.”

Early in his Exxon career Raymond had worked at the lab that developed COREXIT, the dispersant available to use in the sound; he felt he knew the issues from the molecular level on up. But Exxon executives on the scene kept telling him that “the state and special interest groups trying to influence the state” were opposed to using Exxon’s previously approved dispersants, and Dennis Kelso, in particular, was “flat opposed.”
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Alaskan officials and federal scientists later concluded that there had been neither enough chemicals nor delivery systems to make a decisive impact in the time available, but Raymond held just as firmly to the opposite view. The deeper this conviction took hold of him, the more it seemed to harden his belief that once the oil began to pour into Prince William Sound, the corporation acted blamelessly, while environmentalists did not.

“I asked you a moment ago . . . what, if anything, you felt Exxon did wrong, and I think your answer began by saying, well, you didn’t really think it was a matter of right and wrong,” Jim Sherman, a lawyer for the State of Alaska, asked Raymond later at a deposition.

“Well, I don’t mean to be argumentative, but assigning blame isn’t the same as being right or wrong,” Raymond said.

“Well, do you think the State of Alaska’s actions in the first seventy-two hours after the spill in regard to dispersant use were wrong?”

“My own view is that dispersants should have been applied. If you are suggesting that the state didn’t think they should be applied, then I guess we would have a difference of view. And since I’m right, I guess by your supposition you are wrong.”

“By those same terms, did Exxon do anything in the course of the weeks that followed the spill that was wrong?”

“The state may have a view on that and I have a different view.”

“I’m asking for your view, sir.”

“I think— I’m never going to say that we are always doing everything exactly right. I would be naive to do that; but if you are asking me, are there any major decision points that we faced in how to respond to that spill, that in hindsight we would go back and say we think we were wrong, and I don’t think there are any.”
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A
s the oil spread, Samuel Skinner, the secretary of transportation, summoned Admiral Paul Yost, commandant of the United States Coast Guard, to a meeting at the White House. They waited in the West Wing for President George H. W. Bush, a former oil wildcatter who earned his fortune in West Texas before embarking on his career in politics, intelligence, and diplomacy. That spring President Bush was preoccupied by events abroad—spreading dissent in Eastern and Central Europe, pro-democracy students camped out in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and the rising radicalism of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika.

Admiral Yost had made his professional reputation as a patrol boat commander in Vietnam. As Coast Guard commandant since 1986, he had pulled the service toward military discipline. He banned beards, earning the enmity of a generation of officers, and he moved to install naval weapons systems aboard Coast Guard vessels.

In the Oval Office, Yost briefed President Bush on the militarylike dimensions of the
Exxon Valdez
crisis, “trying to explain what was needed to mobilize in a major oil spill, and what Valdez looked like, with one or two motels, and one or two little restaurants,” as Yost recalled it.

Bush looked at his watch. “I’ve had the German ambassador waiting for ten minutes,” he said. “I’ve got to go see him.”

The president turned to his chief of staff, John Sununu, a former governor of New Hampshire. “You take this into your office and get this thing moving,” he said.

Yost and Skinner trailed Sununu through the West Wing. When they sat down, Sununu told him, “Admiral, you’re going to Alaska and you’re going to supervise this oil spill.”

“Mr. Sununu, I’m not going to Valdez,” Yost answered. “I can’t run the Coast Guard from Valdez. It’s a worldwide operation.”