CORDOVA ON THE BRINK
FISHING TOWN SUFFERS ANOTHER DISASTROUS SEASON. WHERE HAVE ALL THE HERRING GONE?

By DOUG O'HARRA
Daily News reporter

ANCHORAGE- Beneath April's sunny skies in a bay off Montague Island, several fishing captains sat in the wheelhouse of a herring tender, grimly awaiting the announcement by state biologists that would once more sink their hopes. For the second year in a row, the spring run of Pacific herring to Prince William Sound was in trouble. After five days of waiting for enough fish to arrive, it was starting to look as though no one would fish at all.

'It's a terrible blow,' says Phil Lian, a Sound fisherman for the past 40 years and now captain of the seiner Helen Kay. 'Everyone is so beat down. Everyone is so pessimistic.'

'It's the Exxon Valdez,' adds Bob Priest, captain of the Hustler. 'The ecosystem has been turned right on its end.'

In the dark green waters beneath their boats, millions of silvery herring were swirling in huge schools. As they do every year, the fish had gathered to spawn -- and fishermen had gathered to harvest a portion of the fish and their eggs, called roe, for sale to Japanese markets. In a good year, each boat could earn $60,000 or more for an afternoon's work.

But last year, an expected return of 130,000 tons of herring never occurred. Only 30,000 tons appeared -- many of the herring covered with open sores and swimming erratically. Inexplicably, 100,000 tons of herring had disappeared from the ocean.

This year, biologists expected at least 30,000 tons to return. But as of April 13, only about 20,000 tons of herring had been sighted -- barely enough to ensure a continued population. And even more puzzling, none were spawning.

'If something doesn't change here with the noon announcement, then I figure we'll just head back to Cordova,' Lian says. 'We've got to figure out something else to do.'

Across the bay, on the state research vessel Montague, Alaska's regional fisheries manager James Brady watched discouraged seiners leaving the grounds one by one to return to Cordova -- or toward Cook Inlet for a future herring run. The Sound's four different herring fisheries -- the 100 seiners, 23 gillnetters, 180 'pound' fishermen and 200 wild harvesters -- all were on hold. For days, Brady had been sending state biologists on urgent aerial searches for the inky sign of herring massing beneath the surface.

On flight after flight, they found nothing new.

'This is a tough year,' Brady says. 'The industry is hungry, and we'd really like to provide them a fishery. It's a real thin line we're trying to cut here, and we're trying to give it every possible chance that we can.'

Test catches by volunteer fishermen had found a few herring with the same signs of disease that first appeared last year. But most herring appeared healthy -- of good size and roe content.

There just weren't enough of them. By a large factor. Even more disturbing, most of the fish were age 6 or older, and the rest were age 4 or younger. Almost none were born in 1989, the year of the oil spill. What was going on?

'We have more questions than answers,' Brady says on the Montague.

But within a few hours, state biologists had a partial answer -- the one certainty of Prince William Sound fishing these days. The herring harvest was again postponed.

Over the next 10 days, biologists kept looking, and twice a day announced that fishing would have to wait. Spawning began, finally, off Montague Island and small pockets of new herring were sighted -- but not enough. Only 12 miles of spawning was seen, less than one-fifth of normal, says Cordova fisheries manager Wayne Donaldson.

'We've hit an all-time low even after last year's all-time low,' he says.

On April 25, the state canceled Prince William Sound's herring season altogether.

The herring had crashed again.

At a final estimate of about 20,000 tons, the once-regular return was an outright failure in the face of healthy herring runs elsewhere in the state. A harvest that had averaged $6 million every spring for a dozen years had been reduced to zero. For the second year in a row, several hundred people had invested thousands of dollars in supplies and permits with virtually no payoff.

Some 900 people -- including the heart of Cordova's work force -- began another season by earning nothing. With last year's crash of pink salmon and an uncertain salmon season ahead, Prince William Sound's fishing economy is on the brink of collapse.

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The demise of herring in Prince William Sound is only the most recent in a series of biological catastrophes that began five years ago, when the tanker Exxon Valdez ripped open its hull on Bligh Reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude oil into one of the richest marine environments in the world.

The turmoil began with closure and restrictions of fisheries during the spill itself, followed by upheaval and trauma during years of cleanup. Since then, the price paid for salmon and herring has fallen from all-time highs and now hardly meets expenses.

The returns of pink salmon, once the Sound's mainstay, fluctuated wildly after years of stability, then began to fail. As a result, the value of fishing permits and boats has plummeted -- wiping out lifetime assets for hundreds of people. Loans have been called, life savings destroyed, people's lives twisted and stressed.

Sorting out the scientific, economic, political, legal and emotional issues isn't easy. For the people of Cordova, it's like a storm that never breaks, a drought without end. On a personal level, there is heartbreak and rage, divorce and financial ruin.

Cordova Mayor Margie Johnson likens it to the Depression. 'It's an extremely difficult time,' she says. 'We have to make awful choices, terrible choices. ... At the last council meeting, we were looking at cutting the school budget. We're fighting to stay alive.'

'It cost me about 90,000 bucks to go fishing last year,' adds Phil Lian. 'It doesn't take long before whatever you've saved is gone.

'Before (the oil spill) no one ever worried that you couldn't make payments or that you were going to lose everything that you had worked all your life for. And that's what it is now.'

There are pending lawsuits -- a months-long trial over whether Exxon must pay damages to fishermen, Natives and communities is scheduled to begin this week.

There are ferocious disputes over how the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council has spent the first third of a $900 million oil spill settlement. A federal audit last year slammed the council for its methods. Many people in Cordova say they are furious with the trustees, the government and Exxon over delays of every kind.

'All we do is bend over, back into it smiling, and go out for another opener,' says Jeff Guard, a first mate on a seiner. 'I don't know how much more we can take of this. What do we have to do? Armed insurrection? Do we have to go stop the whole transport of oil to get something done?'

And then there's the science.

What exactly caused the herring to crash? Was it the oil spill? Or were other factors more important?

There's no firm answer yet -- unless you work for Exxon.

In study after study, the scientists employed by Exxon found no link between oil and ecological damage. In a symposium last year in Atlanta, Exxon essentially declared Prince William Sound fully recovered and disputed that herring had suffered even minimal damage from the oil spill. Any crashes by herring or salmon, they argued, were likely 'density-dependent' -- in which population outstrips carrying capacity, leading to die-offs.

Disagreeing with that view is just about everyone else -- fishermen, environmentalists, government scientists. Many of them have condemned Exxon's studies as biased baloney aimed at winning lawsuits.

'Many people are insulted by the assertions made that it's unrelated to the oil spill or that no one knows,' says Dorne Hawxhurst, executive director of the Cordova District Fishermen United. 'Our members are really, really angry, and many of them will say that.'

Clouding the scientific end of the problem is the fact that most studies conducted so far have been aimed at gathering evidence for lawsuits, not at basic understanding of the ecosystem. No one has what scientists call 'baseline data' -- a scientific portrait of the Sound before the oil spill.

A study conducted by Cordova marine biologist Riki Ott (financed by Greenpeace) compared the scientific methods of government and Exxon studies and found much to criticize. Exxon's methods were almost universally biased and scientifically flawed, often aimed at finding nothing, according to Ott. Government studies, while usually designed properly and not biased, were often incomplete or aborted too soon.

'It's obvious that scientists can do experiments to find nothing wrong -- that's what Alyeska has been doing for 17 years' in Valdez Harbor, Ott says. 'But they're not looking at the right organisms or the right times -- there's a million games going on. And that's what Exxon has been doing in the Sound.

'The scientists are frustrated because science is supposed to be an arena all by itself. But Exxon has dragged it into the media.'

On April 11, the trustees gave final approval to spending $6.25 million to launch a definitive multiagency, cross-discipline study of the Sound's ecosystem -- as well as several special studies to investigate a virus recently found in herring.

'Herring are an important food source to a number of marine birds and mammals injured by the Exxon Valdez oil spill,' said the trustees' chief scientist, Robert Spies, in a release. 'Collapse of the herring population could seriously limit the recovery of other species injured by the spill such as otters, seals and sea birds.'

Scientists greeted the news of the ecosystem study with relief, but others in Cordova expressed outrage that it took five years for the basic science to begin.

'These studies are not going to fix the health of the Sound -- they're not going to bring the herring back,' says Hawxhurst. 'They are only going to tell what's wrong.'

In the meantime, fishermen say the cause-and-effect relationship seems pretty obvious to them: A tanker dumps 11 million gallons of oil into the water, and a fishery that supported communities for decades starts to fail.

'You don't need to be a nuclear physicist to figure out what is happening to Prince William Sound,' declared fisherman-activist R.J. Kopchak. 'Absolutely everything seems to go back to March 24, 1989. That seems to mark the point where things don't work anymore.'

In a press statement released April 12, the Cordova fishermen's group put it more bluntly: 'Our members believe that the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is directly responsible for this latest herring failure.'

Yet government scientists say it's not that simple. Though they agree Exxon scientists are wrong to dismiss oil as part of the equation, they don't yet have the evidence that proves a cause-and-effect link to the spill.

'The oil spill definitely exposed a portion of the population to oil,' says Evelyn Brown, a lead herring researcher for the state. 'Whether that led a majority of the population to succumb to a viral disease, we don't know, and that's the truth. ...We just can't connect all the dots.'

The oil may be a factor in the herring crash, says John Wilkok, a fisheries biologist and Brown's supervisor. 'But like everything else, there may not be a single cause. It could be everything stacked up together leads to what we're seeing now. Oil may not be the most important effect, either, but it may be the straw that broke the camel's back.'

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Begin with what's known.

Herring congregate in huge masses year after year, in the same general areas, to lay roe on seaweed and reproduce. Most returning fish range in age from 3 years to about 10 years -- with the bulk between 4 and 6 years old.

They are small fish, topping out at 130 grams and less than a foot in length. They're easily spooked, too. A noise or motion can make a thousand silver spears dart off in unison, disappearing into the murky depths in an instant.

'The Japanese call the herring the 'ghost fish," says Evelyn Brown. 'They aren't predictable. They aren't like salmon.'

They are the middle of the food chain -- consumers of plankton and tiny sea life, and in turn consumed by bigger predators. Some 40 species of birds, mammals and fish eat them. They are a favorite of humpback whales, which like to roar upward through the schools, swallowing hundreds of herring in a gulp.

'They just look like food,' is how one biologist puts it.

When the millions of herring come to spawn, they create a natural disturbance on the scale of a hundred salmon runs in the same place at the same time.

In 1992, when 100,000 to 120,000 tons of herring returned to the Sound, it initiated a scene that Brown says she'll never forget. There were six humpback whales diving and lunging. Some 2,000 sea lions battled for food with seals and otters. Clouds of screeching gulls nearly blocked the sky -- so loud that at one point Brown couldn't hear the engine of her boat.

'The spawn was impressive,' she says. 'It's an ecological event -- a bird and mammal show.'

Into that frenzy steamed the 1992 Prince William Sound herring fleet, which gathered an estimated 18,000 tons of herring and roe for what became the last real harvest.

That year, fisheries biologists predicted that in 1993, as many as 130,000 tons of herring would return. 'It was a good mixture of age classes,' James Brady says. 'And with normal recruitment, we fully expected to see at least another 100,000 tons come again.'

Yet biologists were disturbed that the 1989 fish -- then 3 years old -- were not appearing in samples as often as expected. That 'class' of fish should have begun to show up at a significant rate by 1992. Its absence became a harbinger.

In 1993, only 30,000 tons of all ages showed up. Researchers and fishermen were stunned. But that wasn't the biggest shock.

Samples of several hundred herring showed that between 15 percent and 37 percent were covered with lesions and open sores. Other fish were bleeding internally and suffered enlarged spleens. Some herring were seen swimming lethargically near the surface, as though weak and sick.

Neither the fishermen who'd spent decades in the Sound nor the scientists who'd spent careers studying the fish had seen herring like this before.

'Some lesions cover the entire back of the fish, some are as big as the top of a pen,' Evelyn Brown told The Associated Press during the 1993 harvest. 'There is bleeding under the scales and discoloration. Some fins are partially missing or rotten.'

Ultimately, gillnet fishermen and others were allowed to harvest about 1,000 tons in 1993 -- about 5 percent of the expected harvest. The much larger seining fleet sat idle. And scientists began to scramble to figure out what went wrong.

To their surprise, they isolated a pathogen in the herring -- viral hemorraghic septicemia, or VHS. It had never been observed in herring. Similar to a virus in European fish, VHS first appeared in coho and chinook salmon in Puget Sound in 1988, according Ted Meyers, the chief pathologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. A few years later, it was observed in Pacific cod in Prince William Sound. Until the outbreak in herring, Meyers says, scientists thought VHS might be an 'exotic' introduction from outside the Pacific.

But finding the virus in herring suffering from lesions, amid a catastrophic drop in population, led them to make this hypothesis:

Something in the environment had stressed the herring -- possibly the oil spill, possibly something else. That stress made them susceptible to the virus, which in turn created the lesions. Open sores made it hard for the fish to regulate salt and water. They would dehydrate and weaken -- then either get eaten by other fish or die.

But Meyers and other scientists soon discovered it was far more complicated.

First, virtually all herring carried the virus -- not just the fish suffering from the infection. Meyers likened it to humans universally carrying cold viruses, but not necessarily suffering colds.

'I think herring have been carrying this virus since the beginning of time,' Meyers says. 'No one had ever looked for it before.'

Then scientists found that they couldn't cause the lesions in the laboratory or make the herring become sick with VHS. The link between the virus and the lesions has since become unclear.

'It isn't a foregone conclusion that the lesions are caused by the virus,' Meyers says. 'So right now, we're looking at this from a baseline type of situation. ...We don't know that much about what's going on.'

Some herring exposed to diesel fuel in a spill off Prince Rupert last year turned up with lesions. An upcoming federal study in Juneau will systematically expose herring to oil to see what happens. Alaska biologists have also heard that herring in the North Sea's Shetland Islands, where oil spilled a few years ago, have begun showing up with lesions.

In the meantime, herring samples taken this year from the Sound continue to show lesions in 5 percent to 20 percent of the fish. Meyers says his staff is examining them and looking for the virus.

What is clear is that at least 100,000 tons of herring have vanished. It's believed that at least some of that number died from the lesions. Some herring are also sick with VHS, apparently brought on by stress. The stress may have been caused by exposure to oil. Or low food supplies. Or other toxins.

There could also be a different explanation for the die-off. Increased predation out in the ocean. Or outright starvation. Or something no one has even guessed.

Or the herring collapse could be caused by a complicated web involving all of the above.

'There's really not any kind of definite link between what's going on with the herring and the oil spill that we can see,' says Meyers, the state pathologist. 'We have no idea what complex environmental conditions are causing this.'

'We don't really know -- all we have is a bunch of causes,' adds herring researcher Evelyn Brown. 'The bottom line for me is that there are a lot of things that we need to find out.'

Brown, who moved to Cordova a decade ago, says her passion in life is studying the ocean and its life. 'I'm an underwater freak,' she says. 'If I could breathe underwater, I'd go under and never come up.'

But for the past four years, Brown has focused entirely on herring. So far, it's been a futile quest for answers. She is one of the scientists who will be part of the new Sound Ecosystem Assessment. But like Meyers and other scientists, she can't explain what's happened.

'My response is total frustration at why I can't understand it a lot better than I do,' she says. 'Everybody wants to know what is going on, and the hardest part is not being able to tell them.'

DREAMS OF A FISHERMAN

While state biologists searched for signs of new herring and collected diseased samples, Cordova fishermen returned to their home port boat by boat.

Among them was John Platt, 33, a third-generation Prince William Sound seine fisherman. He and four crew members retreated to Cordova on April 11, giving him just enough time to load his seine on a boat heading to Togiak, a herring fishery that opens this month.

'I stayed as long as I could afford to,' Platt says.

For a dozen years, Platt had been working his way up the Cordova fishing ladder. After serving in his teens as a deckhand for his father, he saved $70,000 to buy a red salmon permit and a gillnet boat. He worked hard -- mastering the technique of fishing the swift and dangerous channels of the Copper River Delta. He prospered.

'It became really clear to me that you can make more money scratching (for fish) than you can sitting in the harbor,' he says. 'You've got to stay out there and keep pushing.'

Platt next began seining for pink salmon, keeping his nets in the water from spring until fall. In 1988, he bought the Sound Investor for $187,000 -- a boat big enough for his next major step: the herring fishery. In 1990, he bought his herring permit for $235,000, a bargain at the time, and financed the loan with the value of his two salmon permits.

Father of three young sons and happily married, Platt thought he'd finally made it. He owned his boats outright. He knew his trade, he knew how to fish.

'It's kind of like sports,' he says. 'You get out of it what you put into it. You work your butt off, but you can make money. Your income is relative to what you put in.'

In 1991 and 1992, Platt made money fishing for herring -- not a lot, but enough to cover expenses. He was learning fast in a fishery where the learning curve is steep. One good seine of 100 tons -- with a decent price of $600 per ton -- and he could make $60,000. How could he lose?

'It's a crap shoot out there,' he says. 'Not everybody gets them out there, and it's fiercely competitive. But I figured I could always fall back on my pink salmon and my red salmon as a buffer.'

And then everything went to hell.

For two years in a row, John Platt has lost money trying to fish for herring and pink salmon in the same waters from which his father and grandfather had earned livings since the 1930s.

'The last two years in a row, if I'd have left the boats at the dock, I'd be ahead,' Platt says. 'The red salmon have paid for my seining habit the last two years. But it can't keep on.'

Here's what it cost Platt to motor out to Montague Island, wait five days for an opener that never came, and motor back to the dock: $4,500 for insurance, $500 for groceries for a five-man crew, $2,000 for various repairs to equipment, and about $15,000 for payments on his permit. Altogether, Platt invested more than $20,000 in a fishery that didn't happen.

Now Platt faces a hard choice. The state of Alaska has informed him that the value of his salmon permits has fallen too far. They no longer are enough collateral for the $235,000 state loan that paid for his herring permit. Which has also fallen in value.

They now want his boats, too.

On April 14, three days after he pulled out of Montague, Platt stood on the deck of his boat in Cordova Harbor, only yards from his grandparents' old boat, and groped for a way to express the painful quandary that trapped him like a net.

'It's really got down to the nuts and bolts,' he says finally. 'I've got until today to decide whether I want to put my boats up for collateral. If I put my boats up and the fishing stays absolutely terrible, I could literally face losing everything.'

Some of his crew dropped by -- longtime first mate Jeff Guard and Mike Meints, a salmon captain who went as a crew member for the herring.

'Well, John, is it fact or is it a rumor -- that a whole bunch of new herring are coming in?' Meints asks.

'I don't know,' Platt says, frowning. 'Is that what they're saying?'

That morning, the grand opening of Alaska Commercial Co.'s new store -- attended by about half of Cordova's population -- had been abuzz with news that herring had been spotted. But rumors like that can sail through a fishing town with the whim of a gull on wing, and the three men were soon almost laughing about the notion.

'There ain't nothing that's going to happen,' Meints declared finally.

The day before, they heard that all the seiners had pulled out of the grounds at Montague. The last to leave? Phil Lian and the Helen Kay.

A little later, Platt and Guard climbed into the wheelhouse of the Sound Investor and listened to the noon radio broadcast from the state boat off Montague Island. As a biologist's scratchy voice came over the radio, the two men stared at the deck.

Nothing had changed. No new herring had been seen, no sign of spawn anywhere. The fishery remained shut down.

They were silent for a moment. 'They said they were being conservative,' Platt says, almost to himself. He repeated it a few minutes later.

But Guard was angry. He was mad about how the $900 million settlement between Exxon and the government has been spent so far -- '70 percent of the oil was spilled here and only 2 percent of the money has been spent here.' He was mad about proposals to build a marine science center in Seward -- 'the whale jail.' He was mad about the land-preservation schemes outside the Sound.

And he was absolutely furious that five years had passed -- and an ecosystem study had been approved only four days earlier.

'I'm just pissed because nobody's doing anything,' Guard says. 'Nobody's doing anything except litigation-cover-my-ass. They have not been doing their job to try to make sure everything is OK.'

Platt -- one of the fishermen who blockaded Valdez Narrows in a protest last fall -- listened to Guard and shook his head. The only thing to do was to get ready to fish somewhere else.

The Copper River reds would begin to run in May. Platt would be there in a flat-bottom jet boat with his gill net. With any luck, the new herring run in Togiak would be strong. Platt and Guard and the crew would fly up to fish from a leased boat. Then the pink salmon would return. But how many? And at what price?

In the meantime, Platt says, he has no choice but to sign the paper that would add his boats to his loan as collateral. It's a terrible gamble. But if the state forecloses on his herring permit loan, taking all of his fishing permits and ruining his credit, he might never fish the Sound again.

What else could he do?

'If the fish are there, and the opportunity is there, I feel I can do as good if not better than the next guy,' Platt says. 'I've got all the physical ability and the know-how. But one big factor is missing, and that's the fish.'

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