MEASURING THE DAMAGE OF THE SPILL
SCIENTISTS ARE SORTING IT OUT

By CRAIG MEDRED
Daily News outdoors editor

ANCHORAGE- Seven months after the Exxon Valdez slammed into Bligh Reef, there is no doubt the 11 million gallons of North Slope crude oil that inundated one of North America's most undisturbed marine environments was an aesthetic nightmare.

The world watched as the sparkling blue waters of Prince William Sound turned an ugly and threatening black, staining one of America's last true wilderness coastlines. Videotape captured the pitiful agony of oiled birds and sea otters that would normally die out of sight of prying, human eyes.

Television allowed millions to watch intertidal life smothered by the Exxon goo, and outrage welled up in many a soul.

A New York state judge assigned to set bail for Exxon skipper Joseph Hazelwood compared the damage wrought to the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima.

Yet as scientists learn more about the consequences of the continent's largest spill, some are saying that the spill may not be the environmental disaster many feared it would be in March. Nature, scientists note, is governed by the laws of survival, not aesthetics.

Judging environmental damage solely by appearances is foolish, they said. From the ugly scar of a wildfire, for instance, can arise an ecological community richer and more varied than what existed in the forest before the burn.

LONG RANGE EFFECTS UNKNOWN

No scientists are contending, publicly at least, that the Exxon Valdez oil spill will in any way benefit the marine environment, but there are significant disagreements about how much damage has been done.

"The reactions to the recent oil spill in Alaska are another example of environmentalist hype," William F. Royce, professor emeritus of the University of Washington School of Fisheries told the American Fisheries Society at a meeting here in September. ". . . But most of the public comments about environmental effects have predicted far worse consequences than shown by the numerous long term studies of oil in the oceans."

Royce and others agree the spill has altered the environment of Prince William Sound, in some ways subtle and other ways obvious. But the overriding question that frames discussions of the spill among scientists is this:

How serious is the damage?

Some beaches remain slippery with crude today. Others continue to leak the blue sheen of petroleum hydrocarbons. But the oil largely quit killing birds and otters months ago, and the full extent of the damage remains difficult to quantify.

Studies under way since April have collected a wealth of data, but most of the information remains to be sorted, studied and, in many ways, understood.

"It's just too early to say much," said John Trent of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the state's coordinator for wildlife research related to the spill. "Some of these (research) projects are serious ecological projects, and they're going to take a long time."

Certainly Alaska has survived environmental catastrophes before. Marshes now surround forests of dead trees that have remained standing along the Alaska coast since the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 radically altered the landscape.

"That quake . . . caused a 38 foot rise in Montague Island here in Prince William Sound," said U.S. Forest Service ranger Ken Holbrook. "It lifted beaches right out of the water. Today the newly formed shorelines are completely colonized."

Holbrook believes the Sound will bounce back from the oil spill as well as it has from other, more natural, disasters.

"In the long run, I'm fairly optimistic," he said.

Despite initial fears about the widespread havoc the spill would wreak, it appears most of the initial damage was concentrated on the surface of the water and oil coated beaches. Land animals, marine mammals other than sea otters, and fish largely escaped the messy crude, according to scientists.

Oil has yet to be directly linked to black or brown bear deaths, although some bears are known to have waded or rolled in oil. No deer or whales are known to have been killed by oil.

Salmon returned to spawn in healthy numbers. Young salmon alive in the gravel this spring survived the oil that hit the beaches. State fisheries biologists say a cushion of freshwater flowing through intertidal spawning gravels kept oil off the young fish. Most went safely to sea, they say.

The plankton bloom, important food for young salmon, came off normally. Testing of halibut found no signs of oil. Limpets, sea stars and some crabs have already begun recolonizing some oiled beaches.

Scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency also found oil eating microbes thriving on the spill, and they say that with a boost from fertilization those microorganisms will speed the cleanup of Exxon's mess.

Vast stretches of coastline, almost 1,500 miles at latest count, were fouled by oil, but scientists say the great distance may have helped minimize the damage.

SOME OILED; SOME SPARED

There is an old adage that the solution to pollution is dilution. Thinly spread oil does less damage and allows beaches to recover faster. Much of the summer's more than $1 billion cleanup was geared at turning heavily oiled beaches into lightly oiled beaches so nature could help heal the wounds.

By September, the signs of this natural healing were strong enough that U.S. News and World Report boldly ran a cover story headlined: "Alaska's Oil Spill: The Disaster That Wasn't."

Unfortunately, according to scientists studying the spill, that headline is probably as inaccurate as earlier claims the Sound had suffered an environmental catastrophe from which it would never rebound.

The truth, they said, lies in between.

Yes, some species of flora and fauna largely escaped the deadly flow of oil through the Sound and into the Gulf of Alaska. But for others, the initial death toll was high.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists John Piatt and Cal Lensink now estimate that 100,000 to 300,000 birds died in the spill, primarily in the Gulf of Alaska.

Almost 80 percent of the dead are murres. But because some 10 million murres live in Alaska, the high death toll may not threaten the statewide population.

Much the same can be said of sea otters. Otters, popularly perceived to be cute and cuddly creatures, attracted a lot of attention as they struggled vainly in the oil. Upwards of 1,000 of the animals died, but that is less than 10 percent of the coastal population of sea otters in the area of the spill.

"Populations of sea otters and marine birds in Alaska are very large and despite the substantial losses no species was threatened or total numbers significantly affected by the Exxon Valdez spill," Lensink said.

What is important is not how many birds or animals died, but what proportion of each population died, he said. The deaths of tens of thousands of murres may prove insignificant, but the deaths of hundreds of cormorants or loons could prove crippling.

Small, unique populations of Prince William Sound birds could have been hurt badly, Lensink said, and murre and guillemot colonies in the remote Barren Islands between Kodiak Island and the south end of the Kenai Peninsula may have been devastated.

Of particular concern are common and yellowbilled loons, cormorants and harlequin ducks that winter in the Sound. These populations are small, and any losses of breeding birds could be significant.

Scientists believe some bird populations will recovery quickly while others could take decades to achieve the mix of old and young birds that characterized the population before the spill.

Too many variables are at play to predict exactly what will happen, and estimates differ sharply.

An ARCO biologist has predicted that everything could be back to normal in three or four years.

But some environmentalists suggest there could be visible signs of damage for decades.

64 STUDIES, $35 MILLION

Steve Pennoyer, regional director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Alaska, said a complete damage assessment will be difficult. Sixtyfour studies costing $35 million are under way to assess the damage, but even those studies are unlikely to sort out all the longterm consequences.

"It's certainly not going to be easy, particularly on fish," Pennoyer said.

Fish sampled thus far have shown no sign of deadly or even dangerous levels of oil, but some have shown low levels of polycylic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which have been implicated in reproductive failures and poor growth among fish.

"I don't know if I expect anything, but we better keep our eyes open," said John French, an associate professor of fisheries with the University of Alaska. French worries that fish productivity could be suppressed by hydrocarbon pollution, but he acknowledges that there is no evidence of that yet.

"I haven't heard of any larval deformities (among fish)," he said. "If there were huge numbers, I think we'd have heard. We just don't have any real solid data yet."

Scientists working for NOAA conducted extensive trawls in the Sound this summer in a search for fish and shellfish larva killed or deformed by the spill, but Pennoyer refuses to say what they found. Lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department have told him not to talk because of a possible federal lawsuit against Exxon, he said.

Other agencies have released some data on fish:

* The International Pacific Halibut Commission found no oil in halibut in the Sound or along the Gulf of Alaska coast.

* The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation found no problems in any Alaska salmon.

* The Food and Drug Administration found low levels of aromatic hydrocarbons in some fish, but the levels were comparable to those found in uncontaminated fish.

Elevated levels of hydrocarbons were found in shellfish tested by the FDA, but even those levels were only slightly above concentrations usually encountered in uncontaminated areas, according to the Alaska Section of Epidemiology in the Department of Health and Social Services.

The only serious signs of contamination came from studies done for Exxon by its environmental consultant, Dames & Moore. That company found high levels of aromatic hydrocarbons in clams and mussels near a heavily oiled beach at Windy Bay and at Near Island, an area not hit by Exxon oil that is located near the Kodiak city harbor.

Heavily oiled beaches are expected to cause lowlevel but chronic pollution for several years, at least. How this will affect the herring, salmon, halibut and crab worth tens of millions of dollars to fishermen each year remains unknown.

Herring, for example, are hard for biologists to count until they begin to spawn at the age of 5 to 10. So biologists won't know for several years whether fish that spawned this year survived to replenish herring stocks, said Riki Ott, an oil toxicologist and commercial fisherman from Cordova.

"Scientists do know that herring eggs rapidly take up hydrocarbons and that embryonic and juvenile stages are very sensitive to low levels of hydrocarbons. We also know that herring spawned in areas heavily contaminated with oil. But we must wait five years before we will know the full impact," she said.

Much the same can be said for red salmon that left the Sound this year and won't return until 1992. Even in normal times, biologists cannot reliably predict how many will survive their three years at sea.

Weak returns might mean oil did some damage or it might mean that driftnets or food shortages on the high seas took a heavy toll. Sorting out the oil damage from the socalled environmental noise is difficult, Pennoyer said.

Scientists will get their first chance to do that when pink salmon return next summer after one year at sea. Those fish will have grown from fry that emerged into the Sound this spring.

"As far as we know, damage was minimal," said Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Drew Crawford. Crawford studied the survival of young fish after the spill. They appeared to be doing fine there, he said, but may have succumbed to dissolved hydrocarbons in the water as they headed to the open sea.

And that isn't the only danger facing them. Stream flows slackened during the summer, which may have allowed oil to infiltrate the pinks' spawning beds, according to fishery biologists. Consequently, some spawning salmon may have deposited their eggs in a toxic, oily mess.

Just how toxic nobody is sure. North Slope crude oil becomes less toxic as it weathers, according to oil expert James Payne, and the most toxic components of crude oil evaporate or dissolve quickly.

Some nasty chemicals remain, but weathered crude poses little health threat to humans, according to the state epidemiologists. Last month they issued a bulletin noting that while "risk from exposure to aromatic hydrocarbons due to the oil spill cannot be said to be zero" there was ". . .no basis for public health concern."

Fish and marine mammals not obviously fouled with oil are safe to eat, the bulletin said, caution with shellfish is necessary. Some taken from heavily oiled beaches have registered high levels of aromatic hydrocarbons. Others could be carriers of paralytic shellfish poisoning, a common danger in Alaska unassociated with the oil spill.

Tests on the edibility of shellfish, as well as fish and marine mammals, are continuing. Epidemiologists are particularly interested in more data on seals and sea lions eaten by Alaska Natives. Few tests have been done on the flesh of those animals, although the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has examined both species for signs of oil damage.

State marine mammal biologist Lloyd Lowry said the results of tests on oilcoated seals have been encouraging. Biologists had worried that tarcoated mother seals would poison their pups as they nursed this spring, but pups examined by pathologists showed no obvious signs of oil poisoning. Oiled adults also appeared healthy, Lowry said. A few seals died in the oil in the early days of the spill, but there have been no deaths since then, according to the biologists.

Likewise, no deaths due to oil were documented among sea lions or whales. Sea lions were spotted in the oil, said state biologist Don Calkins, but for some reason the oil did not stick to them. He is still trying to figure out why the skin of sea lions acted much like Teflon while that of seals was more like Velcro.

Seventeen gray whale carcasses were found on Kodiak Island over the summer, including some with oil in their baleen. But Pennoyer said there is no evidence oil killed the whales; it may have gotten into the baleen after the whales perished.

"We may never be able to completely rule out one thing or another," Pennoyer said. Five to 15 whales are found dead on Kodiak beaches every spring.

Gray whales can fall victim to the stresses of their long migration from wintering waters off California to summer feeding grounds in the Arctic.

Yet to say whales, seals and sea lions largely survived the oil spill is not to say they escaped unscathed.

NOT ALL OF THE HARM IS EASY TO SEE

Scientists increasingly talk about the "sublethal effects" of the spill, damage to food supplies and reproduction that could take years to show up.

Ott questions whether beachcleaning techniques used by Exxon, with state and federal approval, might have compounded longterm problems. Beach washing with high pressure hoses mixed the oil with sediments, and the mixture sank along the beaches, she said.

Erich Gundlach, an internationally recognized oil expert working as a consultant to the state, said oil mixed in sediments had moved to depths of more than 20 feet along heavily oiled beaches by midsummer.

"A similar phenomena occurred naturally during the Baffin Island experimental spill (in Canada in the 1970s) and the Amoco Cadiz spill in France: contaminated sediments moved to greater and greater water depths over time and . . . animals originally spared from the spill began to fall victim," Ott said. "Instead of direct mortalities, however, slow growth and reduced reproduction were reported."

Oil can affect crab and clams as long as eight years after the spill, Ott said.

Sea otters, scoters and other marine birds prey on adult crab and clams, and their eggs and larva are important marine food sources for fish. All could suffer lowlevel poisoning from eating oiled prey or fall victim to food shortages should crab or clam populations decline.

Scientists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for instance, are watching sea ducks for signs of poisoning. More than 125,000 of these ducks primarily Barrow's goldeneyes, scoters, harlequins and old squaws winter in the Sound. Another 160,000 winter in nearshore waters of Kodiak Island hit by oil.

these birds feed predominantly on clams, snail, limpets clams and blue mussels. The mussels in particular are able to build up hydrocarbons, making them vulnerable to oil long after the obvious signs of the spill have disappeared.

Whether the oil will kill the ducks outright, stunt their growth or hamper their reproduction, no one knows for sure.

"It's going to be difficult to sort it out," said Everett Robinson Wilson of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "It's all going to depend on how subtle things are. There's a lot of environmental noise."

And the studies can get confusing.

State biologists, for instance, noticed a large number of dead rockfish this summer. Some scientists thought it might be oil related. Then one of the biologists noted the dead rockfish had something in common: They were all old.

Biologists now believe the rockfish died of old age, although they have also seen rockfish fouled by oil. That raises a difficult question: Would an old rockfish, weakened by age, be pushed to the grave by exposure to oil?

Nobody knows. There are no simple answers.

Work done to date can be used to buttress a case that the spill did more damage than anyone ever expected, or that it did less. Scientists do know that the Exxon oil didn't stay in the Sound, as many had feared.

Much of the crude poured out of the Sound through Montague Strait and into the Gulf of Alaska, where the wind and waves contributed to its breakup and natural decay.

But the oil that hit the Gulf, researchers have now concluded, may have been far more lethal than what was floating inside the Sound. Almost twothirds of the approximately 33,000 seabird carcasses picked up after the spill came from beaches around Kodiak Island or on the nearby Alaska Peninsula.

Those birds were killed in the Gulf and pushed north and west onto Kodiak by the Alaska Current, according to Lensink and Piatt.

OPEN OCEAN KILLING GROUND

Thousands of birds and hundreds of otters died in the protected waters of Prince William Sound as the slick spread west from the Exxon Valdez, but it was out on the open ocean that the death toll skyrocketed, as the oil rolled over surfacefeeding murres and guillemots. This spill killed more birds than any spill in history, "an unprecedented toll of marine birds from oil," Lensink and Piatt said in a draft study. But the magnitude of the death is matched by the enormous populations of marine birds in the Gulf of Alaska some 100 million birds.

Had the Exxon Valdez spill come a few weeks later than it did, when even more of those birds had moved toward inshore breeding areas, the devastation could have been horrendous. As it was, the timing saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of birds.

Fish and Wildlife Service surveys found less than 50,000 birds in the path of the oil that moved through the Sound. Migratory waterfowl and shorebirds were only beginning to arrive in Alaska when the oil hit.

Many seabirds including puffins, a favorite of Alaska bird watchers were still far out at sea when the oil moved north through their coastal breeding areas. By the time they moved toward the coast, the danger had lessened.

"Oil occurring as a heavy, liquid sheen (through the third week in April) was highly lethal and difficult or impossible for birds or sea otters to avoid," Lensink said. But the subsequent tar balls and patches of mousse "caused relatively few deaths," he said.

Because of this, puffins, storm petrels, kittiwakes and a host of other sea birds largely escaped massive carnage. Scientists say the prognosis is good for these and most other birds that feed on fish, plankton or other, openocean food.

SORTING THROUGH THE PUZZLE

Despite the oil, scientists found that the production of kittiwakes was higher in Prince William Sound than most places in Alaska this year. Kittiwakes are thought to be highly susceptible to oil, Piatt said, so scientists are puzzled. A lack of food or a shift of currents along the Gulf coast could be hurting birds outside the Sound, he said.

"It's been a weird year," Piatt said.

Similar oddities have left scientists confused at times. There was, for instance, a second wave of dead birds in the Gulf in late August and early September.

Few of the birds were oiled, and Piatt said the deaths were clearly natural. They were starving, he said.

But some biologists assumed the new rash of dead birds was related to the spill. One reported finding a black, tarry substance in the stomach of one bird, and that prompted speculation that oil was on the rampage again.

As it turned out, the black, tarry substance wasn't oil.

"Often black tarry stools are blood," said Michael Fry, a University of California, Davis, researcher working with oiled birds. In fact, he said, experienced pathologists examining birds seldom think of oil as a possibility when they find black, tarry stools unless they know the birds have been exposed to it.

Fry said the birds probably began bleeding into their guts because they were anemic from lack of food.

"We've seen a lot of anemic shearwaters from Alaska," he said. He said there were even reports of starving shearwaters trying to steal baitfish off of fishing gear being set by commercial fishermen; normally they avoid people.

Scientists' summer studying the spill has been so hectic that much of the work is in a jumble, said Rocky Holmes, the fisheries research coordinator for Fish and Game. NOAA has collected hundreds of tissue samples from fish and shellfish, but most of the samples have yet to be examined, Pennoyer said. Some never will be. Chemical analysis of tissues is a costly, timeconsuming and sometimes unproductive operation.

In the end, scientists are unlikely to find any easy answers to the question of what the future holds for Alaska waters hit by the spill. But they all agree on one thing:

Given enough time, given protection from any more oil spills, Alaska's waters will, in some shape or form, heal themselves.

---

Story Index: Main | The Impact On Life	Overall: story 149 of 380 The Impact On Life story 35 of 61