Word: oiling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whether or not that is fair, everyone agrees that the damage from the catastrophic spill could not be undone so quickly. Much of the oil has been removed and much has been diluted beyond detection, but quite a bit remains. Though the area's wildlife populations will survive, their ranks have been reduced and are still suffering. No one knows how many years or decades it will take the land and water -- and the psyches of Alaskans -- to recover fully. The only certainty is that Exxon still faces a long siege of recriminations, lawsuits and expense as the company tries...
Antipathy toward Exxon threatens to obscure the fact that it mounted the largest response ever to an oil spill. The effort was like organizing an infantry division from scratch and deploying it in battle within 60 days. At the cleanup's peak, Exxon marshaled more than 1,400 boats, 85 aircraft and 11,300 people. With that mobilization came such daily logistic headaches as providing 200 tons of food and disposing of 1,400 gal. of human waste in a remote and unforgiving environment. "I think Exxon did a hell of a job," says David Usher, whose firm Marine Pollution...
...most promising technique seemed to be spraying the fertilizer Inipol to promote the growth of naturally occurring microbes on the cobbled beaches where rocks were slathered with oil. Certain bacteria "eat" oil, but they grow slowly in Alaska because of the cool water temperatures. Inipol speeds the reproduction of the oil-consuming organisms, and once Exxon began spraying it on with pump-driven wands, beaches showed considerable improvement. "I was impressed with Smith Island," says biologist Jill Parker of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "Before, you couldn't walk on it. It looks so much better." Exxon treated some...
After an embarrassing false start, during which workers futilely hand scrubbed individual rocks, Exxon refined some techniques that show promise for future oil-spill cleanups. The omni-sweep, a spray nozzle at the end of a 100- ft.-long mechanical arm, allowed workers to hose steep shorelines that were otherwise inaccessible. High-temperature, high-pressure rinses proved moderately effective in scouring oil-fouled rocky beaches, but they killed intertidal creatures such as barnacles and snails. Coast Guard Captain David Zawadzki compares the process with chemotherapy...
Multiple treatments were necessary because beaches often became re-oiled. In many cases oil that had seeped down through shoreline sediments to a depth of as much as three feet was pumped back to the surface by 15-ft. tides. "We treated some of those areas as many as seven times," says Exxon spokesman David Sexton. In all, the company says, it recovered 61,000 bbl. of the 260,000 spilled. The $1 billion spent on the cleanup translates into $390 for each gallon of oil recovered...