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BY Nancy Dillon
DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF
Cordova, Ala. - 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."
An estimated 21,000 gallons of spilled oil remains in Prince William Sound two decades after the initial devastation, scientists with the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council report.
Whereas vast schools of silvery herring once supported a multimillion-dollar local industry, the current herring population is still too depleted for commercial fishing.
Bald eagles, pink salmon and harbor seals eventually regained their former strength. But sea otters, harlequin ducks, clams and mussels haven't fully recovered, according to the council.
The human toll also persists, especially in hard-hit Cordova, a fishing village that became an outpost of debt, depression and dry-docked boats.
Families that took out six-figure loans to buy valuable fishing permits before the disaster struggle to stay afloat. The mayor committed suicide in 1993, mentioning Exxon in his note.
Many suffering families hitched their financial survival to the $5 billion in punitive damages Exxon was ordered to pay in 1994. But the Supreme Court gutted the amount to $500 million.
After taxes and legal fees, individual payments didn't come close to covering two decades of losses, several fishermen told the Daily News.
"We got really screwed. From the day that son of a bitch hit the rock, everything changed here," said Doug Pettit, 58, a former Marine who used his $70,000 life savings as the down payment on a $197,000 seine fishing permit and boat shortly before the spill.
Pettit got a second job and a second mortgage to stave off bankruptcy, but interest and penalties mounted. He sold the larger of his two fishing boats in 2000 and finally lost the seine permit three weeks ago to foreclosure.
"I didn't spill the oil, and I'm going to end up losing fricking everything," he said, breaking down in tears. "Twenty years later, it's still a big mess. I just wanted to fish, like my father and grandfather did."
Pettit said he's still more than $100,000 in debt and hopes he doesn't lose his house too.
"(The spill) put me at $2.8 million in lost income alone. I'm just catching up now," Kory Blake, a third-generation Cordova fisherman, said. "It turned everybody's world upside down."
Blake, 50, sold his Cordova home in 1993 to make boat and permit payments. His wife got a job as a school secretary to put food on the table. Still, the dark times continued.
In 2002, the despondent dad put a gun to his head.
"I was at that low a point. I couldn't support my family, fishing was crappy, and I didn't think it was going to get better," he said. "The only thing that saved me was I saw a card that I'd gotten for Father's Day. I couldn't pull the trigger."
Blake got intensive counseling and is back to fishing with a smile on his face. But he's still bitter toward Exxon.
He couldn't afford to send his sons to culinary school in New York, and he now expects to "expire" before he can retire.
"I want to warn the people in the Gulf about going down the same dark hole I did," he said. "Everything in their water that's good to eat is probably going to die. It's going to be tough for a long, long time."
[email protected]
Read more: Future looks bleak for Gulf: Alaska STILL hasn't recovered from Exxon Valdez disaster 21 years later
DAILY NEWS WEST COAST BUREAU CHIEF
Cordova, Ala. - 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."
An estimated 21,000 gallons of spilled oil remains in Prince William Sound two decades after the initial devastation, scientists with the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council report.
Whereas vast schools of silvery herring once supported a multimillion-dollar local industry, the current herring population is still too depleted for commercial fishing.
Bald eagles, pink salmon and harbor seals eventually regained their former strength. But sea otters, harlequin ducks, clams and mussels haven't fully recovered, according to the council.
The human toll also persists, especially in hard-hit Cordova, a fishing village that became an outpost of debt, depression and dry-docked boats.
Families that took out six-figure loans to buy valuable fishing permits before the disaster struggle to stay afloat. The mayor committed suicide in 1993, mentioning Exxon in his note.
Many suffering families hitched their financial survival to the $5 billion in punitive damages Exxon was ordered to pay in 1994. But the Supreme Court gutted the amount to $500 million.
After taxes and legal fees, individual payments didn't come close to covering two decades of losses, several fishermen told the Daily News.
"We got really screwed. From the day that son of a bitch hit the rock, everything changed here," said Doug Pettit, 58, a former Marine who used his $70,000 life savings as the down payment on a $197,000 seine fishing permit and boat shortly before the spill.
Pettit got a second job and a second mortgage to stave off bankruptcy, but interest and penalties mounted. He sold the larger of his two fishing boats in 2000 and finally lost the seine permit three weeks ago to foreclosure.
"I didn't spill the oil, and I'm going to end up losing fricking everything," he said, breaking down in tears. "Twenty years later, it's still a big mess. I just wanted to fish, like my father and grandfather did."
Pettit said he's still more than $100,000 in debt and hopes he doesn't lose his house too.
"(The spill) put me at $2.8 million in lost income alone. I'm just catching up now," Kory Blake, a third-generation Cordova fisherman, said. "It turned everybody's world upside down."
Blake, 50, sold his Cordova home in 1993 to make boat and permit payments. His wife got a job as a school secretary to put food on the table. Still, the dark times continued.
In 2002, the despondent dad put a gun to his head.
"I was at that low a point. I couldn't support my family, fishing was crappy, and I didn't think it was going to get better," he said. "The only thing that saved me was I saw a card that I'd gotten for Father's Day. I couldn't pull the trigger."
Blake got intensive counseling and is back to fishing with a smile on his face. But he's still bitter toward Exxon.
He couldn't afford to send his sons to culinary school in New York, and he now expects to "expire" before he can retire.
"I want to warn the people in the Gulf about going down the same dark hole I did," he said. "Everything in their water that's good to eat is probably going to die. It's going to be tough for a long, long time."
[email protected]
Read more: Future looks bleak for Gulf: Alaska STILL hasn't recovered from Exxon Valdez disaster 21 years later