On the Trail of the Alaskan Oil Spill

by Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

Al Duzenack looked down and grimaced. It was 5 o'clock in the morning on a dark, dreary day in Valdez, Alaska, last July. And it was a good 30 feet down a wet, slippery metal ladder from the weathered dock where a tired Duzenack stood to the pitching deck of the fish tender below. Duzenack had worked until midnight the previous day and would have liked to get more sleep, but the tender's load of freshly caught salmon was waiting his inspection.

So, wearing awkward rubber boots and a two-piece rubber rain suit as protection from the steady drizzle, down the ladder Duzenack went, onto the tender's slick deck, and, after a quick look around, down yet another wet metal ladder into the ship's hold. There, he looked over the walls and floor of the now-empty hold for signs of contamination. Fine, Duzenack yelled, there's no oil here.

Duzenack was one of more than two dozen investigators, scientists and advisers the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sent to Alaska in 1989. Their job was to help state officials ensure that no fish or shellfish contaminated by the March 24 oil spill in Prince William Sound near Valdez got into food intended for human consumption.

Our role was primarily that of assisting the Alaskans, says Roger Lowell, director of FDA's district office in Seattle, Wash. We also wanted to assure consumers that there was nothing of concern about the quality of seafood from Alaska.

New Twist to Old Job

Inspecting seafood and cannery operations in Alaska is nothing new for FDA. The agency maintains a one-person office in Anchorage, which is under the Seattle office's jurisdiction. Both offices regularly send investigators to visit seafood processing plants in the nation's largest state during the commercial fishing season. Their job is to ensure compliance with FDA's wholesomeness, cleanliness and labeling requirements under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. But 1989 was different. The oil tanker Exxon Valdez altered the focus of FDA's routine seafood inspections when it ran aground on Bligh Reef off Alaska's southern coast a few minutes after midnight that early spring morning. Within hours, more than 10 million gallons of crude oil had washed into one of the state's richest fishing grounds. And it happened only weeks before the anticipated start of Alaska's commercial fishing season April for herring, early May for halibut, and June through September for salmon.

Recognizing the need for a coordinated effort by federal and state agencies to make sure no oil-contaminated seafood reached consumers, Lowell and other FDA officials met with their counterparts from the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and from the Alaska Departments of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) and Fish and Game. Separately, the U.S. Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other federal agencies helped Alaska oversee Exxon's cleanup efforts and monitor the oil spill's effects on the environment.

The federal and state officials quickly agreed that a completely open fishing season would soon overwhelm the ability of investigators to keep up with the catch, says Douglas Donegan, ADEC's director of environmental health. Instead, they decided to ban commercial fishing in obviously contaminated waters. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, along with NMFS, was charged with judging which waters to close or open for fishing.

Fishing Limited

In all, one-third of Prince William Sound was closed to commercial fishing by the state in 1989. Even greater restrictions were placed on fishing around Kodiak Island off Alaska's southwestern coast, where only one-eighth of the waters normally fished were opened.

In large part because of those restrictions, less than 50,000 pounds of oil-contaminated fish were found in 1989, Donegan says. That compares with 696 million pounds of salmon caught in 1989 alone, a state record according to Alaska Department of Fish and Game data.

Further, federal and state officials decided to destroy all oil-contaminated fish caught in waters where fishing was allowed. They also designated ADEC to oversee and coordinate all seafood inspections. But, since ADEC's work force was already stretched thin by the oil spill and its aftermath, Lowell says FDA agreed to supply additional investigators, train inexperienced ones, conduct inspections usually done by Alaska officials, and assist ADEC and NMFS with laboratory analyses.

FDA sent 22 investigators to Alaska in 1989, says James Davis, director of investigations for FDA's Seattle district office. They spent a total of about 90 weeks in the state last year, more than double the time usually allotted. And their expenses ran to $100,000, triple the amount budgeted. We assigned people to Alaska who normally would not have gone, Davis says. ?We had them stay in towns for days and weeks at a time rather than [conduct] their usual one- or two-day inspections. Our people worked night and day. They were on site around the clock.

Alaskan Adventures

For Al Duzenack, a 58-year-old compliance officer who has been with FDA since 1960, there were times when he wondered what in the world is an old man like me doing here. He had been to Alaska for FDA before, but not since 1986 and never for four weeks at a time. And, as Gerald Eastwood, FDA's resident investigator in Alaska, says: You find out how resolute you are up here.

Duzenacks day typically began at 4 or 5 a.m when the first fish tenders, vessels that collect the catches of several smaller fishing boats, arrived at the dock. The tenders continued coming throughout the day and well into the evening, sometimes even up to midnight. Fortunately, Duzenack usually knew hours in advance when each tender was due because they were tightly scheduled according to the freshness of their load, weather conditions, and prevailing tides.

After examining the tender and its equipment and hold, Duzenack watched as some 40,000 to 200,000 pounds of fish were unloaded onto conveyer belts for processing. He sampled 200 fish from each tender using sight, smell, touch but especially smell to check for signs of oil contamination. If clean, the fish were processed except for three from each tender; these Duzenack sent for chemical analysis to ADEC's laboratory in Palmer, Alaska, about 30 miles northeast of Anchorage.

If any fish tested by such sensory means, known collectively as organoleptic analysis, seemed contaminated, Duzenack could order the entire tender load detained under authority usually held by the state, but granted FDA last year by Alaska. The seafood processor could still accept and process the suspect load, but had to separate the fish from other tender loads and hold them pending analysis at Palmer. If chemical tests confirmed what Duzenack sensed, the whole load had to be destroyed. If no contamination was found, however, the fish could be shipped for consumption.

Duzenack never found any confirmed cases of oil contamination, but he did manage to lose a fish tender once. When he examined the tender, he noticed an oil sheen on its brine, water in the ship's hold chilled to keep fish fresh until processing. When Duzenack pointed out the sheen, the processor refused the load, and the tender pulled away from the dock. Duzenack went on to inspect other loads, intending to collect samples later that day from the tender, which was supposed to tie up in the harbor.

When he returned to the harbor, however, the tender was nowhere to be seen. After the harbor master tried to contact the tender but got no response, the Alaskan Department of Fish and Game began looking for the vessel and Exxon sent out its search planes.

Hours later the tender reappeared, this time with no visible oil sheen. Duzenack suspects the oil came from leaky hydraulic equipment, rather than contaminated waters, and the tender simply flushed and refilled its hold with fresh brine at sea to eliminate the sheen.

About the Author

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