As the Exxon Valdez oil tanker bled 750,000 barrels of crude into Prince William Sound, a child was about to be born into a very chaotic world. That child belonged to William Bixby, a local attorney in the town of Valdez, Alaska.
As he’s watched his daughter grow up over the past 23 years, Bixby has also watched local communities transform, families break apart, litigations drag on, and hopeless workers turn to drugs and alcohol.
When the ship ran aground, people around the world followed the progress on their TV screens, terrified at the images of environmental destruction. They saw the oil-soaked birds and animals, the frantic cleanup efforts and the hasty retreat of Exxon executives who assured the world that they would make it right.
But they haven’t.
Bixby participated in the spill’s legal aftermath, representing about 1,200 commercial fishermen from communities around the affected area.
“The appeal just ended a year ago,” he said, recalling his experience during an interview with the Vancouver Observer.
“I could tell how long this case was by looking at my daughter…she’s a young lady now.”
Exxon’s oil spill response: empty promises and PR
Following the spill, Bixby says, there was chaos. It was late March, 1989. Valdez—a town that at that point was only home to about 3,000 people—became a central hub of activity when the cleanup began.
“The population grew to between 11,000 and 12,000 because the initial blast of workers was being dispatched through Valdez,” he said.
“And the town just didn’t have the infrastructure to handle that many people. Spare rooms, living rooms; any place was being rented out for people to stay. Mobile restaurants came in to feed the people.”
He remembers the way Exxon dealt with the mess when they swept into town.
“The way they were operating was: ‘Let’s employ as many people as we can, we’ll pay them a lot of money, and they’ll be working a lot. So when it’s time for us to sneak out of town, everybody’s pockets will be filled with cash and they’ll be tired. We’ll promise to come back next year, and away we go’,” Bixby said.
Exxon’s communication strategy with regard to the public, Bixby says, was was “insulting”. They brought their scientists in from down south, ignoring the suggestions and input of well-trained local experts who had an intimate knowledge of the area and its ecosystems. The company held meetings with residents, pledging compensation, but the insincerity of their assurances soon became clear.
“I remember going to Cordova, which is the fishing community in Prince William Sound. It’s a one-product town, and that’s fish,” Bixby recalled.
“They held a town meeting in the gymnasium, and the place was packed. [Company officials] were promising everything—we’re going to clean this up, we’re going to make it right with you people. Everyone will be compensated for their damages.”
What Exxon did do, however, was bring in insurance adjusters to urge townspeople to sign legal agreements, attempting to trick them into accepting “advance” payments that would prohibit them from seeking further damages.
At the time, it was difficult for people to know just how deeply they would be affected, or how much money they could expect to get back.
“No one had any idea what the damage was. The spill kept on spreading,” Bixby added.
While at first it was contained within Prince William Sound, the oil eventually made its way far past the spill site covering 2,100 kilometres of coastline and 28,000 square kilometres of ocean. For a regional economy that had always depended on fishing and tourism, the impact of this horrific event could barely be imagined.
The full extent of the damage may not have been evident right away, but what was immediately clear was that the fisheries couldn’t function.
“They started shutting down fisheries immediately. The bottom of the food chain, as far as most of the fish went, is herring. And it was herring season, when this thing happened,” said Bixby, whose clients were among the thousands of fishery operators that lost millions of dollars in business.
Only 10 per cent of that year’s herring population survived to return from the open seas, he explained, and about 60 per cent of those were diseased. And although following years saw the return of healthy herring that had hatched in seasons past, after a while, the fish were no more.
“There has never been a herring season in Prince William Sound after 1994…at all, even now,” Bixby said.
The legal battle after the oil spill
Before the spill, Bixby says he was the only attorney in all of Prince William Sound. It didn’t take long for other spill-chasing lawyers from out of state to flock to the region, laying the groundwork for what they knew could be the case of their lives.
In all, there were almost 33,000 plaintiffs involved in a class-action suit against Exxon. Bixby said there were seven different law firms that controlled the litigation, including his own, Bixby, Cowan & Gerry.
“The municipal government sued, there were landowners, some personal injury cases…Native subsistence rights were involved,” Bixby said.
When it came to the Exxon Valdez, he knew the lawyers had a fairly solid case to go on. At the time of the crash, the oil tanker was outside of the shipping lane, and the Coast Guard failed to alert the crew of their dangerous position near the reef. The ship’s third mate was at the helm—a maritime “no-no”—while the drunken captain slept off a bender. Exxon had also knowingly failed to maintain the onboard radar system, which, had it been working, would have warned the third mate that the tanker was about to run aground. In addition, Exxon had cut down tanker staff so those on the ship were often fatigued and overworked. In all, it was a recipe for disaster.
“The captain was…he had been drinking a lot that day. And he had a history. He had been arrested for DWI three times before, and Exxon just figured, okay, well, that’s his business,” Bixby remembered.
“The company put him through an alcohol rehabilitation program, which was a joke. I mean, he met with his alcohol counselor in a bar and they had drinks together.”
It seemed shocking that a known alcoholic with previous offenses could be in charge of such a vessel, putting an entire state’s economy and livelihoods at risk—not to mention the massive potential ecological damage if an accident were to occur. And occur it did.
Given the extensive evidence around Exxon’s negligence, the plaintiffs in the case were able to seek both compensatory and punitive damages. The amount they could collect was left up to a jury.
“The jury looked at what Exxon was making, and it was $5 billion a year. And they said, we’ll take a year of your profits,” said Bixby.
But after the initial decision, the case went to appeal courts and that $5 billion was slowly reduced to a fraction of the original damages awarded.
“We ended up getting, when all was said and done…between $1.1 and $1.2 billion,” Bixby said, adding that community members felt they’d been “bent over” during the 20-year process.
Oil companies cut corners while the public pays the price
In Valdez, a relatively wealthy oil town where a large proportion of the population is involved in (and benefitting from) the oil industry, Bixby says residents were not as likely to complain.
“But if you go over to Cordova, where they depend upon fish, that was a different story,” he said.
There, the impact was felt much more intensely.
“Commercial fishermen are a tough bunch. I have clients that would easily lean over the side of their boat and slit their mother’s throat to take a fish away from her. I mean, that’s how competitive they are,” said Bixby.
“And when I was meeting with them, they were like lost children. They just didn’t know what to do. As it went on, friends of mine that were recreational drug users became addicts, a lot of people developed severe problems with alcohol. Families broke apart, people that had planned to send their kids to college couldn’t. It totally disrupted everybody’s life…permanently.”
This is the message Bixby says is most important for people in BC to think about, as the debate continues around tankers and the Northern Gateway pipeline to the coast. British Columbians are increasingly repeating the notion that it’s not a matter of if a spill will happen, it’s simply a matter of when. And Bixby couldn’t agree more.
“I had moved to Valdez expecting something like this to happen,” he said of his own experience.
Before moving there, he said, he had known colleagues in law who were making a fortune off of personal injury cases and other lawsuits related to oil industry failures. For an attorney, it seemed living close to an oil town meant constant work and a steady income.
“The common theme throughout everything is that the oil companies are always cutting corners,” he said.
“And safety is one thing that they can save money on.”
Combine this corporate negligence with delicate ecosystems and a dangerous marine route, and that makes for quite a frightening set of circumstances. While Enbridge touts technological advances and safety precautions that they say make their Northern Gateway plans top notch, their responsibility would end at the port in Kitimat. The province has a marine oil spill response plan, but if we’ve learned anything from Valdez or the Gulf, even the best (or best-looking) attempts at remediation can never really get back all that’s lost.
“When Mother Nature kicks your ass, you can get over it. In man-made disasters, they’re much more difficult to get over when you have something of that scale,” Bixby said.
“And it’s also long-term. If you dig down in the beaches in Prince William Sound…you go down four feet and you can find oil, still.”
It’s time to think back and learn from the lessons of Valdez and the Gulf. Victims of these environmental disasters are still trying to recover, even 23 years after the fact. The Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath have valuable lessons for BC's coast, which is now threatened by the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.