Ongoing vigilance required in Washington's oil spill prevention and response

TWENTY years ago, the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. The inebriated skipper took the most immediate blame for the disaster. Then, as hours and days went by without an effective response, the oil companies and government agencies took their share of criticism for being so unprepared.

But when the inquiries and post-mortems were complete, what was the single biggest culprit? Complacency.

The controversy over building the Alaska oil pipeline in the early 1970s engendered much public interest and many promises of environmental safety. Maybe when the oil first started to flow, state-of-the-art spill protection really was in place. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, felt confident enough to promise that "not one drop" of oil would ever be spilled. But as the years went by and no catastrophe occurred, vigilance slipped away.

Everything changed on March 24, 1989. And when complacency was found to be the underlying problem, an independent citizens advisory group was formed to hold the government's and industry's feet to the fire. It is made up of representatives from the communities and groups around Prince William Sound who were hurt by the spill. The group's name is the Regional Citizens' Advisory Council.

In a word, the council's job is vigilance. They have been funded so that they aren't just talkers — they hire independent experts to evaluate and inform the government and industry spill prevention and response programs. It's not happenstance that the multiple rescue tugboats, weather limitations and aggressive spill-drill program have become more, rather than less stringent in the years since The Big One.

Here in Washington state, we have been trying to apply the lessons of the Exxon Valdez for the past 20 years. Four years ago, state Sen. Harriet Spanel, D-Bellingham, spearheaded the effort to create a citizen council, the Washington State Oil Spill Advisory Council (OSAC). The Exxon Valdez was a distant memory even then, but a bungled spill in Puget Sound awakened us to our own vigilance problem. OSAC has been hard at work ever since.

Amazingly, OSAC is now on the chopping block. The governor has proposed it be eliminated, or that its responsibilities be absorbed by the Puget Sound Partnership, with no specific budget, staff or expertise. What a way to remember the Exxon Valdez!

OSAC has provided technical expertise and an important voice to the people and groups who have the most to lose if we have a big spill — including fishermen, the tourism industry, tribes, conservationists, recreationists and local governments. Perhaps most important, OSAC has taken a thorough, independent look at sensitive questions of oil spill prevention and preparedness, and has exposed glaring weaknesses that hadn't been mentioned by either the oil industry or our government agencies.

Just this year, OSAC released a comprehensive study documenting that we are utterly unprepared to respond to a major oil spill. An Exxon Valdez-sized spill would overwhelm our capability to respond. Indeed, the OSAC study found that we couldn't even handle a spill one-fifth the size of the Exxon Valdez, even in perfect conditions with no glitches.

Without OSAC, there will be voices crying in the wilderness about these issues. But no one will have single-minded mission of vigilance, combined with the expertise to weigh in on technical issues, and the credibility to stand up to oil companies' self-interest and government agencies' limitations. The public will be the loser.

Let's save the Oil Spill Advisory Council.

Brett Bishop is a fifth-generation shellfish grower at Little Skookum Shellfish Growers. Kathy Fletcher is founder and executive director of People For Puget Sound. Mike Doherty is a Clallam County Commissioner.