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As the mission of the congressionally mandated Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, or PWSRCAC, is to promote “the environmentally safe operation of the Alyeska terminal and associated tankers,” its grade so far must be an “Incomplete.”
While the council has helped reduce the risk of another Exxon Valdez disaster, it has failed to address other important environmental risks and impacts, such as the loud underwater noise generated by the tankers and escort tugs, a pervasive pollutant projected at the same low frequency used by baleen whales for communication; requiring full redundancy in engine and steering systems on all tankers hauling oil from Valdez to reduce the risk of grounding due to engine or steering failure; reducing hazardous stack emissions from the tanker fleet — SOx, NOx, PM 2.5, CO2; and slowing tanker speeds to 10 knots to reduce the risk of vessel-strikes to 11 different whale species that share the shipping lanes in Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska.
A vessel speed reduction to 10 knots for large ships is proven to reduce whale strikes and underwater noise by roughly 50%, as well as reducing fuel consumption and stack emissions. But when a proposed vessel speed reduction for tankers in Prince William Sound was considered at the most recent council meeting, one council member complained that there are too many whales these days anyway, and industry complained that, although they voluntarily slow their tankers to 10 knots to protect whales in California waters, the extra 2-3 hours such a speed reduction would add to their Prince William Sound transit might increase fatigue in bridge crews. Thus, the council voted overwhelmingly against recommending a tanker speed reduction for Prince William Sound — precisely the result the industry wanted.
On this, and many other environmental protection issues, the oil industry is now exhibiting the exact sort of arrogance and resistance to environmental safeguards in Prince William Sound that it exhibited prior to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.
Additionally, the federal agency mandated to protect whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, issued a spectacularly inaccurate, unscientific assessment of the issue in Prince William Sound, evaluating ship-strike risk to just one of the 11 whale species, and thus declined to require a tanker slowdown. Relying on this inaccurate federal assessment, the tanker owners declined to act voluntarily. So through this triad of indifference and incompetence — NOAA, Prince William Sound tanker owners, and the Citizens’ Advisory Council — the oil industry again gets away with lower environmental standards here in Alaska.
The council today is crippled by its own political bureaucracy, and captured by the very industry it is supposed to monitor. While some council members and staff diligently advocate the organization’s core environmental mission, the group overall is dominated by pro-industry/anti-environmental politics, undermining the council’s fundamental purpose. Rather than an oil industry watchdog, the council has become an oil industry lapdog.
As funding for the Citizens’ Advisory Council currently comes directly from the oil industry — Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. — it is time to shift its funding over to the federal Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, thereby insulating the council from direct financial influence by the oil industry.
Further, as the existing Citizens’ Council is authorized by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, OPA 90, only as an “Alternative Voluntary Advisory Group” in lieu of the specific Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, or RCAC, required by the act, it is subject to regular federal recertification regarding its compliance with the requirements of the act. It is now incumbent of the federal administration to reassess whether the current PWSRCAC indeed fully satisfies the required provisions of OPA 90, or whether the administration must now decertify the current PWSRCAC as an Alternative Voluntary Council, and move forward itself with establishing an effective RCAC that fully satisfies the national interest in providing independent environmental oversight of oil transport in PWS.
The Citizens’ Advisory Council is a critical component of the environmental safety net for oil shipment through Prince William Sound, but it has veered astray and needs a course correction. The council needs to stop being a fawning apologist for the oil industry, fully recommit to its critical environmental oversight mission, and hold the PWS oil industry to the highest global standard of reducing oil’s environmental footprint, risk, and impacts to the maximum extent possible.
Rick Steiner is a marine conservation biologist in Anchorage, was the University of Alaska’s marine adviser for Prince William Sound based in Cordova from 1983-1996, and was one of the founders of the PWSRCAC in 1989.
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