Environment: The Stain Will Remain On Alaska

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Exxon maintains that the cleanup is a success. Says senior vice president K. Terry Koonce of the 1,100 miles of shoreline treated: "It's reasonably clean; it's pretty pristine." The Coast Guard, which must sign off on the work Exxon has done, is more guarded. "We don't like to use the word clean," says Captain Zawadzki. "It's not as easy as washing dishes." Protecting itself against future charges that it let Exxon off the hook, the Coast Guard will / certify only that the company's cleanup plan has been executed as described.

Alaska, meanwhile, has sued Exxon and the other oil companies that operate in the state for as yet unspecified damages. In a campaign of harassment (financed almost entirely from cleanup funds provided by Exxon), state officials manage to find fault at every turn. Says Steve Provant, a state cleanup coordinator: "I don't think any of the beaches are clean." Recently the state withheld approval for Exxon to use a floating incinerator it had brought to Alaska at a cost of $5 million after initially telling the company that burning was the preferred method of waste disposal.

The 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 commissioner Kelso was quick to brand the industry's previously filed oil-spill contingency plan "the greatest piece of maritime fiction since Moby Dick." But he had approved the document.

In retrospect, it is clear that the state should have used more of its oil income (an estimated $2 billion a year) to regulate the industry more tightly. Instead, the oil money has flowed into entitlement programs, which pay all Alaska residents an annual stipend of some $800 and senior citizens an additional guaranteed income of $250 a month. Even today Alaska officials bristle at the suggestion that residents who benefit from oil shipments should be made to share some of the burden of safeguarding them.

The 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.