WAGES OF THE OIL SPILL DIVIDE THE COMMUNITY OF CORDOVA

By CHARLES WOHLFORTH
Daily News reporter

CORDOVA- Money is changing this proud little town in ways an earthquake, a big fire, even a huge oil spill never could. Cordovans, who at first stood together like no other community hit by the March 24 spill of the tanker Exxon Valdez, now are dividing along fissures of distrust and big money.

It is growing harder for some to be angry at Exxon. The oil giant has removed the risk of running a business in Cordova. It pays store owners whose profits have dropped from last year enough to make up the difference. Fishermen have been paid for losing the herring season, too. Exxon now has staunch defenders in town.

But Exxon isn't just paying for the economic survival its spill threatened. Business is booming for some store owners and many fishermen have chartered their boats for Exxon oil cleanup work that pays astronomical fees and carries no expenses. Hundreds of Cordovans have left their jobs to make high wages working for Veco, Exxon's cleanup contractor.

Many of those left behind to run businesses without their employees or to fish for a living instead of cashing in on the charters, resent missing out on the big money, or criticize the morals of those who took it. The ennobling emotional unity of the early, fearful part of the disaster is slipping away.

"The real disruptive thing in the community is the money," said Connie Taylor. "In the longterm sense, I think that'll cause more damage than the oil does to the people involved. Longterm friendships have been destroyed by the money. And the guy who decided not to go to work with Veco just on principle isn't going to make the money, while the people who did made enough money to put their kids through college."

Taylor, the chairman of the Cordova Oil Spill Disaster Response Committee and president of the Chamber of Commerce, spoke loudly to be heard over her small offset printing press, pumping out business forms, which is half of her printing and art gallery business. A fat orange tabby cat watched from a shelf. Taylor got ready to print the Cordova Fact Sheet, an oil spill daily paid for by Exxon through the city government.

Taylor said there is not much more Exxon could do to cushion the blow of the oil spill for Cordova, a town of more than 2,000. The biggest current economic problem Exxon hasn't already taken care of is a severe shortage of labor in Cordova, she said. Workers have quit their jobs to make $16.69 an hour working on the spill, leaving a deficit of about 300 workers, or about 20 percent of the summer work force, according to a chamber study.

So the chamber asked Exxon to subsidize local wages to bring the low cannery work pay into competition with the oil spill work. And since making everyone's wages the same would undermine lines of authority in local businesses, the chamber asked Exxon to subsidize everyone's wages by the same proportions. A $25anhour manager would receive an extra $40 an hour from Exxon under the plan, and make $65 an hour.

Exxon balked at putting the entire town directly on its payroll, but did set up a program to recruit workers for Cordova and other towns, said spokesman Henry Breathard. If need be, the company will hire an executive search firm to find prospective cannery workers in the Lower 48, he said.

Down in the boat harbor, fishermen are bringing in a good catch from the Copper River salmon fishery, but they would be making more money cleaning up the oil spill, and some feel cheated that they are not. They see small town conspiracies in their exclusion. Others use bitter curses to describe fishermen who gave up fishing to work the spill.

And it is not getting any better. With salmon fishing in Prince William Sound proper a few weeks away, even more conflict is in the offing. Fishermen still remember last year's crowded combat fishing in front of the hatcheries. They still talk about who cut them off by placing a net in the way and who could be expected to block a channel with a net.

If there is fishing in the south and west part of the Sound this year, it is sure to be even more crowded. Oil could compress more than 475 boats into an area a small fraction of the size they usually fish in. "That's not going to be a competitive fishery," said Jerry McCune, president of Cordova District Fishermen United. "It's going to be a nightmare."

Yet the idea of cooperating has been abandoned. Fishermen who already felt cheated out of cleanup work didn't expect to get their fair share under a cooperative fishing scheme, either. They threatened to break off and fish on their own.

"The first person who does that, I'm out there, too," said Garrett Evans, standing by his big fiberglass seiner.

When the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks, many in Cordova said they feared their town would die. Now it is hard to find anyone who says they ever believed that, but many say they heard others saying it. Back in the early days of the spill, there was a different mood in Cordova.

Diane Tickell, the Episcopal priest, is not a sentimental 72yearold, but she was moved at a town meeting early on when townspeople stood up to share their feelings, recite poetry and sing "Solidarity Forever."

"One woman got up and she read the entire Declaration of Independence," Tickell said. "She said she'd just struck on it in the library and she wanted to read it. And, you know, I inwardly groaned. But we all listened. No one got up or walked out, and no one talked or mumbled. And in the end, she was in tears, and she said "God bless you all,' and she got a huge round of applause. It was a great moment."

Tickell doesn't think it could happen now. "There probably isn't the great need for it," she said. "You can't do things twice."

Besides, everyone in town is sick of meetings and worn out by their feelings.

"People are getting tired," Tickell said. "A lot of people, their husbands are away on the oil we use that expression, isn't that interesting, "on the oil' and they're at home alone with the kids and have a boring time."

Time is passing. The daffodils, lupine and strawberries have bloomed. Down on Marine Way, near a boat house stranded from the water by the 1964 earthquake, the salty smell of tidal mud mixes with the fragrance of wet spring foliage. The seniors have graduated and women's softball has started on the small, muddy field next to the high school. Children play around boats and nets in the driveways of old wooden houses which, in the constant rain, have grown moss on the roof and lost flakes of paint from the wooden frames of their storm windows. In the bars, fishermen from Seattle have returned and rewarmed old friendships.

None of this has changed much since Dick Tapley got here, in 1938, the year the railroad to the Kennecott mine closed, the copper company pulled out and Cordova became a fishing town, although it is smaller than in railroad days, he said. In that year he came back from fishing in Bristol Bay with a $2,800bankroll and bought a house, furnished, including a piano, for $1,000.

"A lot of them had the idea that they were just shutting down (the copper mine) so they could cut the wages, and that they'd reopen," Tapley said. "Until they started shipping out the locomotives. Then they knew it was over. The ones that sold out, they practically give their places away. But the fishermen lined up to buy them."

Tapley is 80 now. He lost his eyesight 10 years ago, but he still fishes the Copper River flats on his gillnetter. His wife, Tina, steers the boat and picks most of the fish out of the net. She is 70.

None of Cordova's series of disasters the closing of the mine, the big fire of 1963, the 1964 earthquake left much of an impression on Tapley. He remembers, but he doesn't complain. Cordova always pulled through, and there was always one reason, he said. "Tough people."

But he isn't so sure about the oil spill. "It'll be maybe a couple of years," Tapley said. "We know that there's a lot of damage all right, but we don't know how much. But we won't know until a couple of cycles go through."

Cordova fishermen were ready to work on the oil spill hours after the Exxon Valdez hit the rocks. When Exxon couldn't find a use for them, they went out on their own to work with the Department of Environmental Conservation to protect fish hatcheries threatened by the oil. In the first week, fishermen wondered if they would be paid for their fuel.

"We had 75 boats out there as volunteers," said McCune, the fisherman's union president. "We never asked Exxon to pay us. They threw the money into the arena. And we didn't ask to be dispatchers."

Exxon began signing contracts with fishermen. Amazement spread at how much the oil company was paying. Exxon provided fuel and food, and paid in the range of $3,000 a day for an average fishing boat. Some fishermen have worked two months straight since then. Some have bought new boats to fish and hired someone to run their leased boat. Some have abandoned the idea of fishing.

"There was a distinct change in the attitude of the town when the contracts started coming out," said fisherman Mark Munro, who still has one boat out on the spill. "You've got the haves and the havenots the people who have contracts and the people who don't."

Greg and Bill Sharavarin, young men with the untrimmed beards of the Russian Orthodox, stood on the docks in the rain, with a dozen others, knitting closed the holes in their gillnets made by sea lions and reluctant kings. They were getting ready to head out into a gale in their old fiberglass boats to fish, complaining that they couldn't get hired to make the big money on the spill.

"The big guys got paid. That's why everything's under control in Cordova," said Greg Sharavarin.

"We're looked down on like little guys," said his brother Bill.

They said they would not agree to a cooperative fishery. They believe the larger operators would take all the money for themselves in that, too.

The brothers are from Oregon, but Dennis McGuire is a Cordova resident. "My boat never got hired. I was on the list from April 5 on," he said. Like others who didn't get hired, he suspects a clique of friends kept the contracts to themselves. "It started out among friends, I think, then it developed from that. It was where you were with your friends."

McCune said his union dispatched boats according to what kind of boat was asked for, following a program which gave priority to local residents and permit holders. "CDFU did the best job that they could," he said. But he is glad to have turned the boat dispatch over to Veco. "We wanted them to take it over, because there was a lot of complaints."

Phil McCrudden didn't take his boat out. He stayed in town and worked on setting up a claims process that lawyers on both sides could agree to, and then received a check for missing the herring season.

"The reason to work on the spill is to clean up oil," McCrudden said. "If they got paid extremely high rates, that's just because of the general inflation in the situation. But if you came up to fish, and you get the money you would have gotten from fishing, then I don't think you have a complaint for not making money working on the spill."

He said if there was unfairness in the assigning of contracts it was probably due to the confusion that reigned in the early part of the spill.

"If Exxon is willing to stand up and do the right thing to pay everyone what they owe, and make really meaningful reparations to Prince William Sound then OK, they made a mistake, but more power to 'em," McCrudden said.

Life is not back to normal in Cordova. The town ran out of gasoline Thursday and it had to be flown in, raising the price to $2.50 a gallon. Radio station KLAM went off the air because the maintenance worker who keeps the transmitter working went to work on the spill, said General Manager Robert Clapsaddle.

He said Exxon agreed to pay half the cost of repairs to the transmitter and the station will also file a claim for advertising revenue it lost since the spill. Clapsaddle also went to work on the spill, leaving his wife, Susan, in charge of the oneperson station. She is also working at the cannery to help out a friend.

Cordova is unique in having claims paid by Exxon to businesses which have no direct relation to fishing or the water. Ulyesse LeGrange, an Exxon USA senior vice president, made that decision after a series of meetings with local business owners. He said he was convinced that in Cordova, every business is directly related to fishing.

Jeff Bailey said his cafe in a book store on Main Street has lost business since the spill because everyone is out of town fishing or working on the spill. Also, its hours have been cut back because employees quit to work on the spill.

But Exxon has given him a check at the end of each month to bring his earnings up to what they were at the same time last year. Now he is trying to persuade the claims adjusters that his business would have made even more this year because of the improved fishing that was expected.

Bailey said the appearance that Cordova is doing well is an illusion. "There's an appearance of normalcy without normalcy," he said. "I think we'll all get over it. We're pretty strong down here. This will change us forever, but it won't kill us."

Tickell is retiring after 10 years as rector of the tiny St. George's church. It was built in memory of a railroad engineer and hasn't changed since the railroad closed, except that the corners of the rows of wooden chairs have worn down and a sleepy sense of age has settled in the soft light that comes in the windows through huge spruces.

"There's a certain depressed atmosphere," Tickell said. "I don't know what there is to feel better about. It is true some people are making a lot of money chartering their boats out. Money speaks loudly, and it also complicates things. It isn't that people are being bought off. It isn't that. But one guy was quoted saying, "This is the best thing that ever happened to me.' My gosh, what a thing to say."

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