Word: cleanup
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Today, the coast is clear and clean. But clean is not the same as pristine. Decades ago, some of the spill found its way to a beach on Knight Island in the Sound, a site that scientists studying the accident would designate KN-102 but which during the multiyear cleanup would earn another name: Death Marsh...
...reporter personally saw oil buried in a handful of beaches. Ironically, the Exxon spill has greatly enhanced scientists' understanding of the effect that crude oil can have on a vulnerable marine environment: it is more toxic to life than we thought, and harder to clean up. "Even the best cleanup will fall short," says Craig Tillery, a deputy attorney general for the state of Alaska - whose Bristol Bay and Chukchi Sea are being considered for offshore oil and gas exploration - and a member of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which funded the NOAA studies. "You have to make...
...many parts of the Sound - close enough for animals to be affected by it. "The oil may not leak out in quantities that are immediately visible, but that doesn't mean it's not there," says Jeep Rice, a NOAA scientist who has led the studies. "We thought the cleanup would be a one-shot deal - but it's still lingering...
Those 20,000 gallons, out of at least 11 million spilled, might not seem like much, and scientists initially assumed that whatever oil was left behind during the original cleanup would eventually break down naturally. But it turns out that crude oil - especially when it is spilled in a cold region like southeastern Alaska - lingers in the environment for years. And as long as the oil is there, it can harm the animals that might come into contact with it. Sea otters, for example - the face of the Valdez spill - dig millions of foraging pits in beaches around the Sound...
Scientists are still digging into the Sound's beaches, trying to get a better sense of how much oil might be left and whether it will be possible to finish the cleanup. And there are still other questions that need to be answered. The Sound's valuable commercial herring fishery collapsed completely a few years after the spill - there are just 10,000 tons of the fish left today, down from a peak of 150,000 tons before the accident - and researchers are trying to figure out what impact the oil might have had on the species' decline...