21 years later, Exxon Valdez story is still complicated

WHITTIER -- What no one wrote about 21 years ago was that even then a reporter had to go looking to find Exxon Valdez oil in Prince William Sound. It was more than a 10-mile run from the harbor here east across the clean, generally calm waters of Passage Canal just to reach the clean, open chop common to Port Wells at the western corner of the Sound proper.

At that point you could turn the wheel of the Muckracker, the Anchorage Daily News' 19-foot Boston Whaler skiff, north into the clean, wild waters of College Fjord and go on for more than 20 miles past the waters off the mouth of the Coghill River teeming with sockeye salmon in late June and early July and on to the white face of Harvard Glacier, the largest tidewater glacier in this corner of Alaska.

Nobody, to my knowledge, ever did, though. The salmon fishing off the mouth of the Coghill can be very good in midsummer, but the Daily News reporters involved in oil spill coverage back in the day were young and responsible and focused on the story of the moment.

No Daily News reporter would even have thought of taking the boat off on a pleasure trip, though some of the managers who jockeyed for position after freewheeling editor Howard Weaver became preoccupied with studying philosophy at Cambridge University clearly saw it otherwise.

They began demanding detailed plans from anyone wanting to use the boat to go anywhere. As a result, it sat tied to the dock in Whittier a lot more than it should have and The Seattle Times won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Exxon Valdez spill.

The sad thing is a lot of the spill madness escaped all the news coverage because so few reporters were hanging out in the Sound. There weren't enough reporters out there in boats making the decision to spin the wheel west at Port Wells to head for Knight and Naked and the other smeared islands.

To this day, one hears stories about the waste and theft associated with the spill cleanup, about the Exxon executives who were supposed to be taken to see oiled beaches only to be taken to fish for halibut off those beaches instead, about the unoiled sea otters captured by out-of-work fishermen because catching otters was what they were hired to do and, as fishermen, well, catching things is fun.

The oil spill cleanup was madness. Every reporter -- even the ones who saw only a tiny part of what was going on -- figured out that much fast.

The clean, wild places remaining in the Sound weren't part of the story. Probably they should have been. Context is everything in journalism, or at least it's supposed to be. Journalists like to believe they at least try to give people an accurate picture of the world. We didn't do that very well in the Sound.

Anyone reading about the Exxon spill would have been hard pressed to know how much of the area was spared or how the oil itself hopscotched north and west toward the Gulf of Alaska like a major forest fire.

There were always pockets of devastation scattered amidst areas that somehow miraculously escaped.

I remember helming the Muckraker carefully into Marsha Bay in the dark of night. It was early in the spill when Weaver was still letting some reporters run wild. And I'd been the one who talked the Daily News into buying the boat, though in retrospect, I should have just bought the boat myself and run truly wild.

That would have headed off the issues to come with all the haggling over "scoping" to determine "well, EXACTLY what are we going to find if we go there?" Not to mention all the worrying about potential legal liabilities with bumbling reporters at the controls of the Muckraker.

None of that really started until the second or third year of spill coverage, though. In 1989, the only real concern was that somebody might bring a beer on the boat. Drunken Exxon Valdez skipper Joe Hazelwood had made such a mess of things we couldn't even throw a beer in the cooler to enjoy at the end of the day.

But we could run around largely unsupervised. I remember well dropping another reporter off with whale researchers near the northern tip of heavily oiled Knight Island and then going on my own personal sightseeing cruise of the Sound.