ExxonMobil statement - the condition of Prince William Sound

The environment in Prince William Sound is healthy, robust and thriving. That's evident to anyone who's been there, and it is also the conclusion of many scientists who have done extensive studies of the Prince William Sound ecosystem. The claim made by several environmental groups of continuing "severe" ecological damage to the Sound is simply untrue. It is contradicted by hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted by researchers from major independent scientific laboratories and academic institutions.

Following the 1989 tanker accident, ExxonMobil retained some of the world's leading scientists to assess the impacts of the oil spill on the Prince William Sound (PWS) ecosystem. This research program documented both the damage and the subsequent rapid recovery of the Sound in studies which have been published in numerous peer-reviewed technical journals and presented at professional conferences throughout the world.

What science has learned in Alaska and elsewhere is that while oil spills can have acute short-term effects, the environment has remarkable powers of recovery.

As a part of our commitment to sound science and to the people of Alaska, we have continued over the years to monitor the PWS ecosystem. Oil remnants are only being found where they were known to have existed at the conclusion of the cleanup and where the Coast Guard concluded there was no net environmental benefit associated with further cleanup eleven years ago. The abundance of biology in close association with the remnant oil remaining today refutes the notion that this oil residue has any significant biological effect. The vast majority of the affected shorelines have no visible oil remnants on the surface or sub-surface.

Definitions/Examples of Recovery

The oil spill Trustee Council says that there are only six species that have recovered fully from the impact of the spill — eagles, river otters, black oystercatchers, common murres, pink salmon, and sockeye salmon.

ExxonMobil — and many independent scientists — disagree with these conclusions about species recovery because they create an erroneous impression of the true conditions in Prince William Sound today.

Trustee advocates continue claims of lingering injury still today. Their shoreline excavation efforts indicate that perhaps a total of 26 acres of buried oil remain in isolated pockets and wave shadows of large boulders. Researchers of international reputation, supported by ExxonMobil do not dispute the issue. There is nothing new here that has not been seen in other worldwide spills over the past 40 years. It is likely that these small pockets will remain for many years to come. However, our research does confirm that these small pockets of residual oil are not a source of contamination for intertidal species which in turn serve as the food base for larger species such as harlequin ducks and sea otters. Although trustee researchers present cartoon depictions of how residual oil could reach these species and thus lead to vague claims of lingering injury to consumer species, our field research examining potential oil contamination in numerous intertidal and fish species confirms the lack of any such contamination. These data strongly support our position of a fully recovered Prince William Sound ecosystem.

The dispute over which species have recovered is largely a technical argument over the precise scientific definition of recovery. The Trustees define specie recovery as a return to pre-spill population numbers or an increase in that number. We believe this definition is misleading because it is not a practical or accurate measure of the actual state of recovery in the Sound. Furthermore, the recovery of the Prince William Sound ecosystem cannot be measured or defined by the recovery of the few species the Trustees are investigating. The Prince William Sound ecosystem is populated by thousands of other species that were not impacted by the spill, or were impacted but recovered quickly. This fact cannot be ignored.

Recovery means a healthy biological community has been reestablished and that the plants and animals characteristic of that community are present and are functioning normally.

This definition works for two important reasons:

• This definition is not dependent on pre-spill versus post-spill measurements. It recognizes that there is very little baseline data from before the spill against which to measure current conditions. Scientists have little pre-spill information, for instance, about the population of harlequin ducks. Without baseline data, it is impossible to know how the current population of these birds compares to the pre-spill population.
• Secondly, it recognizes that nature changes all the time, a concept that scientists call "natural variability." We all witness natural variability when, for example, there is a big winter storm, a heat wave, or an El Nino event.
  
  That's why we can't expect that Prince William Sound will ever be exactly, precisely as it was before the spill. Any definition that uses as an absolute standard the return to pre-spill conditions just isn't realistic.
  
  Natural variability has been at work in Prince William Sound throughout the fourteen years since the spill, and it is extremely difficult to isolate the impacts of the oil spill from the many more significant impacts of natural events that have taken place during that time. For example, the average summer water temperature in the Northern Gulf of Alaska has increased in the last eleven years at least three to four degrees above the historical average.
  
  The Executive Director of the Trustees, Molly McCammon, has recognized the problem in the past. In response to a question last year about whether oil or natural causes were impacting the environment in Prince William Sound, she said — quote — "To really tease out an oil spill impact is very difficult."

Examples of problems with the Trustees' claims:

• The Trustees acknowledge that the total population of harbor seals was declining throughout the Gulf of Alaska, including Prince William Sound, long before the oil spill in 1989.
  
  Yet, the Trustee report states — quote — "harbor seals will have recovered from the effects of the oil spill when their population is stable or increasing."
  
  Under this Trustee definition, the only way that harbor seals could ever be officially judged recovered from the oil spill would be for this long term trend — a trend completely unrelated to the oil spill — to be reversed.
• Here's another example. The Trustees' claim that salmon are not recovered from the spill. Yet, in the years since the spill, there have been six of the largest harvests ever recorded.
  
  In fact, in 2005 the number of pink salmon was so large that Alaska's Department of Fish and Game has allowed fish processors to strip valuable eggs from millions of unneeded pink salmon and discard the fish carcasses. The number of excess pink salmon in 2005 is expected to exceed the 15 million excess salmon experienced in 2003.
  
  The Trustee Council statement that salmon have not recovered completely ignores these facts.
• Marbled murrelets are a bird specie whose recovery is almost impossible to ascertain under the Trustees definition of recovery. The Trustees say that the population had declined before the spill. Their current research finds the population has had no significant increase since the spill. Those facts seem to indicate the population is stable. The Trustees definition of recovery for murrelets is that the population should be stable, yet the Trustees still have not declared the marbled murrelet recovered.
• A final example is the murre, a seabird greatly impacted by the oil in 1989. Murre populations fluctuate widely due to a myriad of factors. Furthermore, there was little information about the size of the murre population prior to the spill. Yet for the Trustees, murre population recovery is dependent on a return to pre-spill conditions — when it is obvious that no one knows what those conditions were, or what the population would have been had no oil been spilled.
  
  These are but four examples that illustrate why the Trustee matrix of recovery classification is neither a practical nor accurate way to evaluate the true conditions of the environment in Prince William Sound. On the surface it seems so simple, but ecosystems are very complex. There are a number of species for which the Trustee recovery definition simply doesn't work. And the Trustees' public comments regarding recovery commonly ignore the fact that there are many thousands of species in Prince William Sound that were never affected by the spill in the first place, or recovered quickly after the initial impact.

It is ExxonMobil's position — and that of many independent scientists — that there are now no species in PWS in trouble due to the impact of the 1989 oil spill.

Certainly there were severe short term impacts on many species due to the spilled oil, and they suffered damages. But, based on the studies of many scientists who have worked extensively in Prince William Sound, there has been no long term damage caused by the spilled oil.

The ecosystem in Prince William Sound is healthy, robust and thriving. This level of recovery conforms to the well established record of recovery documented by the scientific community following many other oil spills around the world, many of them much larger than the one that took place in 1989.