Twenty-five years ago today, on March 24, 2014, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska. The 11-million-gallon oil spill killed an estimated 200,000 sea birds and wrecked the regional fishing industry. Though some species have recovered to pre-spill levels, the herring and orcas have never rebounded past a tiny fraction of their former numbers. Click here for a recap and update on the disaster.
Though all agree safety has improved considerably in the years since, with double-hulled ships, blood testing (the captain of the Exxon Valdez had been drinking) and somewhat stiffer penalties for toxic spills, recent events prove that as long as we rely on these highly poisonous fuels for the bulk of our energy, accidents are inevitable. Equipment fails and humans make mistakes. The 2010 BP Deep Horizon Rig disaster killed eleven workers and put an estimated 200 million gallons into the Gulf of Mexico. Just yesterday, a barge collision with a ship in the Houston Ship Channel near Galveston has leaked some 170,000 gallons there so far.
The race to extract hydrocarbons from ever more difficult environments guarantees there will be serious environmental costs. Such processes as drilling under ever deeper waters, particularly including the Arctic seabed, unearthing coal by mountain top removal and squeezing hard-to-reach oil and natural gas from rock formations by fracking are fraught with sufficient risks that the laws of probability ensure regular episodes of devastation.
The sad truth is that our means of coping have advanced but little. The toxic dispersants and floating booms and sweeps they use today are little changed in the quarter century since Exxon Valdez entered our consciousness. Our development of solar and wind resources are accelerating but remain at a relative snail's pace compared to the surging world demand for coal, oil and gas. We must do better than this.
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