Bridge The Gulf with Alaska’s Riki Ott
Ed. Note: Please check out the wonderful work that’s being done at Bridge The Gulf. They’re one of the few groups really looking into the long term effects of BP’s oil spill and much more – witnessing what happened in Alaska thanks to Exxon unfold in the Gulf. Interview by Bridge The Gulf’s Cherri Foytlin “I will share my personal story of flying over the Exxon Valdez and seeing this little three-football-field-long tanker in a sea of oil, and going, ‘Okay, I am going to spend the rest of my life working on this and I am not going to go…
Walking With the Ghosts of Exxon
It’s 5 a.m. on the 4th of July, and the alarm goes off. I open one eye and think surely I must have set it for the wrong time, but then I remember. Today I’m heading to Prince William Sound with Shannyn Moore and Zach Roberts. Our goal is to document the lingering effects of oil, still present in the Sound after the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in the spring of 1989. It’s 2010, and a child born then would be 21 years old now. It’s hard to believe. I was not in Alaska back then. I,…
Exxon Spill – 25 Years of Tears
Time has a strange affect on events in our lives. I feel I’m looking through a glass of water when I look back 25 years to this day, March 24, 1989. I’d left Seattle University and the Ballard Lochs on the M/V Westward heading north through the Inside Passage of British Columbia for the sac roe herring fishery in Sitka. No time in my life is etched as clearly as that spring. There is a certain magic about following Spring to Alaska. Per my not so scientific study, I’ve determined Spring moves at about 9 nautical miles an hour, about…