Alyeska Tapes Shed New Light on Valdez Spill

In the first days after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, top oil industry emergency officials lacked the equipment and personnel to clean up the accident while they tried to give the appearance that they did, according to taped telephone recordings recently released.

The conversations also appear to support the state of Alaska’s claims that the oil companies did not have enough chemical dispersants. If Alaska can prove that claim, the state may be able to win stiff punitive damages it is seeking in a pending lawsuit against Exxon Corp. and Alyeska Pipeline Services Co.

“We expect (the tapes) to show the jury that the state wasn’t at fault,” Alaska Assistant Atty. Gen. Craig Tillery said.

The conversations were secretly recorded by Alyeska, the industry-owned company that operates the Valdez oil terminal, and offer the most revealing record yet of how Exxon and Alyeska coped with the spill.

The company contends that confusion among Alaska state agencies delayed approval for the emergency teams to use chemicals to disperse the oil, resulting in a larger and more costly cleanup effort.

In one conversation contained in a transcript released Tuesday by the Alaska attorney general’s office, then-Alyeska President George M. Nelson discussed other emergency measures.

“It doesn’t look well in the media, and we’re not taking them this story . . . (but) the equipment we have in our contingency plan and the equipment we got out there . . . four or five hours late frankly didn’t do a damn bit of good,” Nelson told Atlantic Richfield Co. executive Harold Heinze soon after the spill.

In a separate conversation, according to transcripts, Exxon executive Don Cornett said: “It doesn’t matter if they are really picking up a hell of a lot of oil. . . . It makes a real bad impression with the public, without any activity going on.”

Though Alyeska had given the tapes to some government agencies investigating criminal charges arising from the spill, congressional investigators, National Transportation Safety Board and private plaintiffs suing Alyeska apparently were unaware of their existence.

Transcript summaries were released late Monday by the Virginia-based Hamel Project for Environmental Accountability, run by oil-company critic Charles Hamel.

House Interior Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) sent a letter Wednesday to Alyeska President Jim Hermiller demanding complete copies of the tapes and any other undisclosed information Alyeska had involving the period after the spill.