As seen in the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico last year and in ExxonMobil's pipeline spill in Montana this summer, the public expects accurate and timely information about oil spills and the efforts to clean them up.
In the Gulf and in Montana, the amount of oil spilled was calculated by the spiller and the cleanup effort was based on those estimates. Each time, the spiller's first estimate drastically understated the size of the spill and its potential environmental impacts. The public was kept largely in the dark about cleanup strategies and outcomes.
Estimating spill volumes isn't easy. But that doesn't justify discouraging community participation in cleanup efforts and limiting public access to information. Such practices only inflame outrage and exacerbate mistrust.
We live in an era of instant communication. Any disconnect between reality and the official line from the oil industry and its regulators is immediately captured and flashed around the world by radio, television, and the Internet.
The resulting public outcry is loud and predictable, but it could be ameliorated by making the management of oil spills more transparent.
The public is understandably uneasy when it sees the government partnering with an oil company that has just had a big spill and understated its magnitude. But that partnership is exactly what's called for in the National Response Plan. (This plan, which grew out of the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990, establishes a nationwide framework for dealing with oil spills.)
Of course the spiller should pay for a fast, effective cleanup, as the National Response Plan requires. But it is not acceptable that the spiller leading the response should go unchallenged when informing -- or even misinforming -- regulators and the public on the severity of its spill, while barring public access to reports on damage and cleanup efforts.
Public trust requires regulatory independence in evaluating, and transparency in disclosing, the size of the problem and how the public's interests are being protected. Burying skeptical reporters and traumatized citizens in statistics like miles of boom deployed and the numbers of boats and people at work is little more than a smoke screen. It ignores the questions that most need answers.
Faced with this scenario earlier this year, Montana's governor pulled his representatives out of the Unified Command (the cleanup management team made up of government agencies and the spiller.)
In Alaska, I'm happy to report, we have a relatively high level of transparency during oil-spill cleanups. Our Department of Environmental Conservation takes part in the Unified Command. The department establishes a public website where it promptly posts summaries of the estimated size of the spill, descriptions of cleanup efforts, and goals of the response team.
This model seems to work and to promote public trust. Years after a spill in Alaska, it is still possible to go back and see how, at any point in the cleanup, the teams working on it grasped the magnitude of the problem and organized their efforts to deal with it.
Alaska's system of state-directed transparency in oil spill cleanups and the federally mandated citizens' councils for Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, put in place after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, are good models for addressing the recurring issues of transparency and public trust that plague the handling of oil spill reporting and response elsewhere.
With the news media reporting confidence in our oil industry and our government to be at historic lows -- impeding responsible development of our natural resources -- isn't it time to learn from past disasters and use the Alaska model to maximize transparency and accountability whenever and wherever our nation suffers a major oil spill?
Mark Swanson is executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council, www.pwsrcac.org.