Future looks bleak for Gulf: Alaska STILL hasn't recovered from Exxon Valdez disaster 21 years later
The old fisherman wrapped his freckled knuckles around a shovel and started digging on the low-tide beach.
Six inches down, Robert (RJ) Kopchak saw the telltale, iridescent sheen smearing the groundwater.
"There it is. That's oil coming out. I can smell the hydrocarbons," he said as gumball-sized tar balls bubbled up. "It's just poison soup is what that really amounts to."
Kopchak, a fisherman for 36 years, wasn't standing on a contaminated beach in Louisiana or Florida.
His rubber boots were planted on Prince William Sound in Alaska, where the Exxon Valdez hit a reef and dumped 11 million gallons of crude in March 1989 - far less than the estimated 73.5 million to 126 million gallons that have gushed into the Gulf.
"It breaks my heart to see this," said Kopchak, 62, a co-founder of the Prince William Sound Science Center. "There's still (subsurface) oil everywhere. And if you dig, you get exposed. If you're a sea otter, you're digging here all day long."
Link:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/20/2010-06-20_it_wont_go_away_21_years_later_oil_still_stains_alaskan_coast.html
No comments:
Post a Comment