Remembering the Exxon Valdez from the deck of a Coast Guard cutter

Rear Adm. Matthew Bell assumed command of the U.S. Coast Guard's 17th District — Alaska — in May. He has previously served with the Coast Guard in Alaska, and was at the scene of two of the state's major maritime disasters, the groundings of the Exxon Valdez and the Selendang Ayu. In a meeting with the Anchorage Daily News editorial board this week, he shared this remembrance of his role in the immediate aftermath of the worst oil spill in Alaska's history. 

I was up on the maritime boundary line as the Exxon Valdez ran aground. So we left the MBL on turbines to make that trip across the entire Bering Sea through the Unimak Pass, across the Gulf of Alaska into Prince William Sound, and trying to go on turbines the whole way. Trying to fast. You can't, because every time you try to make a course change, you're beam-to or the props are coming out of the water and you just — you really appreciate it or hate it all the same.

(Arriving in Prince William Sound), I think I felt inadequate. I'm on a 378 (-foot cutter, the largest class of Coast Guard cutters at the time) — we were doing fisheries patrol, international relations, maritime boundary line interactions with the Russians at that time. And here we show up in Prince William Sound — and we're a big ship, we do fisheries law enforcement warrants — and we show up in Prince William Sound, and you can smell the oil. The ship's still up on the rocks at the time, and of course we didn't have fuel, so we had to go in and immediately fuel and come back out.

We were like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much to do." One of the first things that we did was we ended up taking the Air Guard for Prince William Sound. So we ended up (going from) three flights a day to 300 flights a day, so we had our air traffic control and our combat information center. So I now have two radio radar men, standing 24/7 watch controlling the amount of air traffic that's coming in and out of Prince William Sound. Most people were just coming to take a look, but now it's all the resources that are just flying in to the region. Look at Valdez — it's not a big airport. And now all these resources are trying to fluctuate in. There was no offshore presence from a radar perspective, so that's now (the responsibility of) our ship.

Of course, from a spill response (perspective), cleaning up the oil, (we were) inadequately prepared. But now from a command and control perspective, which is what our big ships really bring in, now we've got command and control, we've got eyes on scene, we've got coordination, we've got people who can actually stand that watch and now control assets moving, coming and going. And at that time, that (gave me) a full appreciation for what a command-and-control platform can really do. The Coast Guard isn't technically going to clean that up, but we're going to monitor it and supervise, and coordinate all of the assets that are on scene.

Of course, after that is the control effort — how do you control things moving to the beach, things moving back over to the ships where they're offloading all the hazardous materials and coordinating those efforts throughout Prince William Sound?

We're still seeing the effects of that (spill). You can go to any one of those beaches, turn over rocks and you can still see the oil. Most of that's under the rocks, of course, and if you don't disturb them, it's fine — but that impacts life in perpetuity.

Rear Adm. Matthew Bell Jr. is the commander of the 17th Coast Guard District.