Q&A: A Human Disaster
Authors:
Barry Yeoman
An interview with Steve Picou
In June, when oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill washed up on Orange Beach, Alabama, 400 yards from Steve Picou’s house, the irony couldn’t have been more bitter. A sociology professor at the University of South Alabama, Picou is an expert on the human impact of technological disasters that cause massive environmental contamination. After the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, he spent two decades studying Cordova, Alaska, a commercial fishing village whose residents have suffered from depression, family conflict, and a host of other woes. In late June, two months after the BP spill, he spoke with Barry Yeoman, a journalist and former Louisianan.
You’ve talked about how a natural disaster can make a community more cohesive, whereas a man-made disaster causes it to become more fragmented. Why is that so?
If you look at the traditional natural-disaster model, people generally quit blaming God for their misfortune within a week and come back to rebuild the community better than it was before. However, with technological disasters, there is a principal responsible party. There’s never an “all-clear” that the disaster is over. People are permanent victims. This becomes a continuous, corrosive source of distress and fragmentation over time.
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Tell me about your work in Cordova after the Exxon Valdez spil l.
I flew to Cordova in August 1989 with my friend and colleague Duane Gill, who is a sociologist. With such a small community we mapped literally all the residences, and then randomly selected houses, knocked on the doors, and asked people if they would give a face-to-face interview. It may have been the pity factor: two Southern guys walking around in the rain with questionnaires. But we got over 200 interviews. With those in hand, I applied for a National Science Foundation grant and put together an entire research team.
What did you find? And what were the long-term impacts?
In 1993 the former mayor of Cordova, Bobby Van Brocklin, committed suicide. He left a note that partially blamed the spill. By 1994 it was obvious that the community was having serious problems. A grassroots organization called the Cordova Family Resource Center was created to provide shelter for battered women. This wonderful little community had never had that need before. There were a lot of mental health problems. We’re talking about commercial fishermen who are self-reliant, hardworking, and supportive of one another in times of distress at sea. It’s just not their fashion to drive their pickup truck to the mental health center, where everybody sees it, and say, “Look, I need help.” Even though the majority of people who needed help were not receiving it, the center was overrun. Counselors were burning out. Directors were overwhelmed. The caseloads were very, very heavy.
How about the impact at the broader social level?
There was a loss of trust, a breakdown of family and friendship networks. People weren’t talking to one another. Professor Kai Erikson of Yale University talks about “collective trauma.” For example, people would rather not go to the bar—which in Alaska is like the pub in Ireland. They said, “I don’t want to hear all of the venting and anger about this oil spill. So I will go to the liquor store and make my purchase and stay home.” Then, as the litigation dragged on, there were still a lot of people suffering. The primary source of stress had moved from the oil spill to this incredibly complex process that was going back and forth in the courts. So litigation became the second disaster.
I imagine that process must have created a lot of cynicism.
We saw the complete distrust of institutions. Corporations: certainly no trust. Federal government: totally unreliable. State government: How can you believe anything they say? And the legal system: one commercial fisher told us, “I can’t even say the Pledge of Allegiance anymore, because at the very end it says, ‘with liberty and justice for all.’ ”
It’s easy for me to understand how all of this causes the social fabric to fragment. Does it also create actual conflict between people?
Yes. For example, some people get their boats leased and some people get to work on the cleanup, but others don’t. There’s no logic to who is selected. That drives a stake through the heart of a community, because you have some people who are fortunate enough to be making money and other people who are hoping to be able to pay their mortgage next month. In Alaska, they called the winners “spillionaires.” But I also heard another term: “Exxon whores.”
Let’s turn to the Gulf. Is it too early to gauge what’s happening there?
I have to be honest with you: what I’m observing is like the Exxon Valdez fast-forwarded. In Alaska we started seeing devastating impacts emerge three, four, five years after the spill. Here, we’ve already had our first suicide [a charter boat captain named Allen Kruse]. It took four years before a suicide occurred in Prince William Sound. I heard the mayor of Bayou La Batre, Alabama, say on local television that calls to his police department have doubled in one month. He also said there’s been a spike in domestic violence. It took time before that happened up in Alaska. But we learned from the Exxon Valdez that this is a marathon. This is not a 100-meter dash.
In dealing with mental health issues, have the Gulf Coast communities been able to draw directly on the techniques that were developed after the Exxon Valdez?
We’re just beginning. Some people came down from Alaska—fishermen and Alaska natives. They did not want any fanfare, but they met with people in South Louisiana and along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I know St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, has already developed a peer-to-peer listening program based on a program we started in Cordova. People are getting trained to recognize clinical levels of anger, symptoms of PTSD, depression, and suicidal ideation, and to provide a constant source of friendship.
You talked about Exxon whores. Are we now going to see BP whores?
I think that will unfold over time. Right now, everyone wants to be a BP whore. There are going to be some winners and some losers.You’ve said that although Prince William Sound and the Gulf Coast seem different on the surface, there are also some striking similarities. They’re both made up of small fishing communities, and the Cajuns in South Louisiana have traditions that are very similar in many ways to those of Alaska natives. The communities are entirely dependent on the harvest of renewable resources and are proud to pass this heritage on to the next generation. The children are not prepped to go to college. They are raised to work on their grandfather’s boat.
Unlike the Exxon Valdez, this spill has had a direct impact on you, living right here on the Gulf. What was your first reaction when it happened?
When they said there was no oil coming out after the rig exploded, I said, “I know that’s not true.” So the first feeling was: I don’t trust them. I do not trust BP, and I do not trust the relationship they have with the Coast Guard. It seems too cozy. Then the information came out about the Minerals Management Service and the environmental impact assessment that was written to save walruses and sea lions and sea otters. Even my 8-year-old granddaughter knows there are no walruses and sea lions and sea otters in the Gulf of Mexico. So I have a real understanding of why the people in Cordova can’t say the Pledge of Allegiance.
You can actually walk down to the beach from your house and watch the oil washing up. How does that make you feel?
I had a very emotional response when I saw all these people coming out with cameras to take pictures of the oil. People come from all over the country because of our pristine sugar-sand beaches. Now they’re taking pictures of this poison on my beach. We went out there just one day. We’re not going back. Too much pain.
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Q&A: A Human Disaster
The Fight Against Drilling
Two years ago, NRDC celebrated an important victory when a federal court ruled against Shell’s bid to drill for oil in waters off the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Now NRDC has gone to court to halt Shell’s new drilling plans in the same waters. In January, the Obama administration granted the company permission to do exploratory drilling in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort seas, despite evidence that this could lead to dangerous oil spills and irreversibly damage the sensitive Arctic ecosystem. "We know far less about the Arctic than we do about any other part of the earth," says Chuck Clusen, director of NRDC’s Alaska program. "We desperately need a time-out on drilling so we can first understand, scientifically, what we need to do to protect this ecosystem." The Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco will likely issue a decision this summer, says Clusen, although drilling could start as early as June. The Chukchi Sea, which lies off Alaska’s northwestern coast, and the Beaufort Sea, along the state’s northeastern coast, are home to endangered bowhead and beluga whales, polar bears, seals, and dozens of species of Arctic birds. Shell’s new permits allow the company to drill just 20 miles from the wildlife refuge. Arctic ecosystems are already jeopardized by climate change, which is accelerating faster there than in other regions. The human activities associated with oil exploration, including increased pollution, noise, and added roads and traffic, will intensify the effects of climate change, such as the melting of sea ice, according to Tara Connelly, an Arctic scientist in NRDC’s Science Center. "Almost all aspects of the marine Arctic ecosystem are related in some way to sea ice, and its loss will affect everything from algae to top predators like polar bears," Connelly says. Large animals, including walruses and polar bears, depend on sea ice for hunting and breeding; tiny brine channels within sea ice also house the unique microbial communities that fuel the Arctic food web. Experts predict that a major oil spill will occur if commercial drilling is allowed to proceed. When that happens, little can be done to protect fragile wildlife against the inevitable ensuing devastation. "The conditions up there are dark and very cold, and we just don’t have the technology to clean up oil in cold waters amid broken ice," Connelly says. "There’s no infrastructure in the Arctic to respond to such a disaster."
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The Fight Against Drilling
Lessons from the Exxon Valdez: Oil Spills Shatter Relationships and Communities
In 1989, five months after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, sociologist J. Steven Picou arrived in the fishing village of Cordova, Alaska (population 2,450), to document the human toll that resulted from 11 million gallons of oil poisoning the ecosystem. Picou and his colleagues were underfunded and unprepared, wearing cheap plastic ponchos that were no match for the regin’s torrential rains and subsisting on canned wieners and beans. But their studies of the community in the aftermath of the oil spill revealed lives shattered and a town torn apart by social and psychological damage that lasted for two decades. Today Picou is a professor at Southern Alabama University and one of the world’s leading experts on the social ramifications of oil spills — something his neighbors in Orange Beach, Alabama, could soon come to experience for themselves. He lives 300 yards from the Gulf of Mexico, potentially in the path of oil gushing from the sea floor following last month’s explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. As he and his home prepare for the possibility of a disaster rivaling the one he studied in Cordova, what Picou learned in Alaska gives his neighbors fair reason to worry, but it could also provide them with tools to cope and perhaps avoid some of the worst of what could soon befall them. A Town Torn Apart After the Alaska spill, Picou’s psychological surveys detailed sleepless nights, unfocused anger, misplaced emotions, unwanted thoughts, lost friendships, and soured family relationships among the people of Cordova. Those feelings lasted for years; many people never did heal. Residents say that divorces and suicides resulted from the spill. Four years after the disaster, a former mayor took his life, leaving a note blaming the act partly on his inability to help the community recover economically and emotionally from the crisis. Picou’s surveys found numerical indicators of stress levels that matched what researchers would expect to see after a personal crisis such as rape or the loss of a child — although he takes pains not to equate those events with the spill. The stress turned the town into a "corrosive community," in Picou’s phrase, as local politics and social relationships degenerated into demonization and feuding. Last week, Picou heard from one of his old friends in Cordova — a fisherman who had seen pictures on TV of an oil-slicked bird, stricken by the BP spill. The man couldn’t stand to watch it. He felt nauseous, he told Picou, and had to turn the TV off. Relying on the Environment The spill zone in the Gulf is more heavily populated and accessible than Alaska’s shores, but many of the fishing communities, especially in Louisiana, bear a striking similarity to coastal towns and villages in Alaska. They’re small, insular, culturally distinct, and 100 percent dependent on a clean marine environment, with local economies that rely entirely on fishing. Picou believes that communities with a more direct relationship to their environment are especially vulnerable to the psychological harm he saw in Cordova. "Even though the players are different and it’s three or four thousand miles away, the social and community consequences look very much the same to me," Picou says. Before the Exxon Valdez spill, Cordova’s social and economic heart would beat with the return of the herring and salmon, which brought work, money, and a sense of purpose to the entire community. The decline of those fisheries — in the case of herring, a total loss — ruined the fortunes of fishermen whose sense of personal identity hinged on their ability to support their families in a good, middle-class lifestyle from the waters of the Sound. The early response to the Gulf spill by industry and the government bears a disturbing similarity to that of the Alaska disaster. Their initial containment efforts were ineffective, and their reassuring early statements later proved false as the disaster became much worse than originally described. Picou has advised locals in the Gulf to defend their own waters, homes, and livelihoods, avoiding the sense of helplessness and forced dependency on Exxon that affected Alaskan fishermen after their spill. Trying is important, even though history shows that once a large quantity of oil is released in the water, the economic and environmental damage it causes cannot be stopped. Reaching Out to the Gulf The differences between the Exxon and BP disasters are significant, too. The Gulf spill’s lighter oil, slower release rate, and greater distance from shore all help. Unlike Exxon, which was widely criticized for its slow response and lack of community outreach, BP seems to be learning from its early errors. For example, the company is providing block grants to state agencies, which are directing the funds to local protection efforts. As a result, there are more hands on deck to protect important natural resources, as thousands of people deploy floating booms across coastal estuaries. That was never possible on Alaska’s inaccessible shores, where transportation was more difficult and the floating oil arrived in a matter of days. After the Exxon Valdez , the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council created an award-winning handbook for use by other communities coping with similar technological and environmental disasters. Advice ranges from how a local government can set up an incident command structure, to stay in control of information, finances and operations, to creating a peer counseling program so that neighbors can support one another. The handbook is now posted on the council’s website , where Gulf communities can access it. Veterans of the Alaska spill, including activists who know what information to request from oil companies and spill experts who can help organize clean-up efforts, are already working with environmental organizations and agencies in the Gulf region. Best Advice: Stick Together For Picou’s part, the sociologist finds himself offering advice to his neighbors and speaking to local media outlets, sharing bits of wisdom that may help them avoid some of the social and psychological pain that tore apart the people he came to count as friends in Cordova. Above all else, Picou says, "I’m trying to encourage them to stick together." But his experience also makes him realistic. The oil’s damage will not be entirely stopped, nor will the damage to people and their relationships. As was the case with Alaska’s fishermen, those who rely on the Gulf’s fish for their livelihood have already begun to feel betrayed by the government and BP. In particular, Picou notes, fishermen on the Gulf Coast believed their friends in the oil industry who said that drilling was safe and that spills would not threaten their fishing grounds. Now, as he nears retirement age, Picou is working to train younger researchers to do what he did in Cordova for 20 years, taking his carefully crafted surveys to communities throughout the Gulf. What he learned in Alaska, he hopes, can help his neighbors in Alabama, and what his protégés learn this time might help the victims of the next disaster, whenever and wherever it comes. Alaska-based writer Charles Wohlforth covered the Exxon Valdez spill and its long-term impacts on the community and environment. His new book, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth , will be published June 8.
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Lessons from the Exxon Valdez: Oil Spills Shatter Relationships and Communities