Chugach National Forest: Prince William Sound and the Oil That Changed Everything

The Chugach National Forest covers five point four million acres of Southcentral Alaska, making it the second-largest national forest in the United States. It wraps around Prince William Sound to the east and south, extends along the Kenai Peninsula, and encompasses the Copper River delta on its eastern edge, one of the most important shorebird stopover sites in North America. Several million shorebirds, including huge flocks of western sandpipers and dunlin, use the delta during spring migration, concentrating in densities visible from shore.

Prince William Sound, inside the forest boundary, was the site of the most significant oil spill in American history at twelve minutes past midnight on March twenty-fourth, nineteen eighty-nine, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef and released approximately eleven million gallons of crude oil into the sound. The oil spread across more than eleven thousand miles of coastline. It killed an estimated two hundred fifty thousand seabirds, nearly three thousand sea otters, three hundred harbor seals, two hundred fifty bald eagles, and as many as twenty-two killer whales.

The Exxon corporation eventually reached a settlement of nine hundred million dollars in civil damages and one hundred million dollars in criminal penalties. A jury had initially awarded five billion dollars in punitive damages; the Supreme Court reduced that to five hundred million in two thousand eight, nineteen years after the spill, by which time many of the original plaintiffs, most of them Alaska Native subsistence fishers and commercial fishers, had died without receiving compensation.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill led directly to the Oil Pollution Act of nineteen ninety, which required double-hull construction for all new tankers operating in United States waters. The single-hulled Exxon Valdez was eventually sold, renamed twice, and scrapped in India in two thousand twelve. Some oil remains in Prince William Sound beach sediment today, accessible by turning over a rock.