Word: spills
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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...
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...
...other circumstances makes a corporate fetish out of accounting for every last barrel in its inventory. "I'm not going to speculate how much oil is left and where it is," says Sexton. As much as 25% of the crude may have evaporated in the early days after the spill. Much of the rest, guesses Lars Foyn, a fishery expert with the Marine Research Institute in Bergen, Norway, has become diluted in the water and disappeared. Most of the experts in Alaska privately agree with that dispiriting theory, but no one wants to be the first to say that...
...state has repeatedly criticized Exxon for failing to contain the oil in the days after it was spilled. But officials are less eager to admit that the state did almost nothing to make sure that the oil industry was prepared for a major accident. Over the past ten years, the staff of the state's oil- pollution-control management program was reduced from three people to one. Says Paul O'Brien, who ran the program until one month before the spill: "There weren't enough resources to do the job right. I was stretched pretty thin." After the accident, environment...
...Alaska tragedy shows that no amount of money and finger pointing can compensate for a disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill. Once the oil got away, there was no way to clean it all up. Alaskans can only hope that the cleansing storms of winter will continue the scrubbing that Exxon merely started...