Patience “Pat” Anderson-Faulkner (left) and her mother, Eleanor Waha of Grand Marais, at the Cook County Historical Society Lightkeeper’s House in January. Anderson-Faulkner lives in Cordova, Alaska and has been a tireless advocate for people whose livelihoods and communities suffered after the 1989 Valdez oil spill in Alaska and, more recently, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While she was in town, she gave a talk on her experiences.
Patience “Pat” Anderson-Faulkner of Cordova, Alaska, is an amazing volunteer, just like her mother, Eleanor Waha of Grand Marais. She has been helping to mop up the environmental, financial, and social effects of the Exxon Valdez oils spill in Prince William Sound ever since it happened in 1989. On January 29, she spoke to a crowded room of people at the Cook County Historical Society Lightkeeper’s House about her experiences, more recently as an advocate and encourager of those who suffered loss from last year’s BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Anderson-Faulkner, who holds a degree from the University of Alaska in justice and sociology, took a side trip up to Grand Marais after speaking at an Exxon Valdez art display in the Twin Cities.
Legal battles
After the Valdez oil spill, Anderson- Faulkner worked as a legal technician, tasked with verifying the credentials of people applying for jobs cleaning up the spill. Over the next 10 years, she worked with attorneys in the trial that followed, helping fishermen make claims. Many livelihoods were lost because of the damage to the fishing industry.
Of the 32,000 plaintiffs in that lawsuit, 8,000 are now deceased 22 years later. She now represents the Cordova District Fishermen United on the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council and said that the last check from the $500 million settlement had just come in.
One of her jobs after the Valdez spill was to work with insurance companies. She would take insurance representatives down to the harbor and show them the boats sitting there, saying that all of those boats were paying the mortgages on all the houses in town. Many of the boats were mortgaged as well.
After the oil spill, communities saw rises in divorce, alcoholism, drug abuse, child abuse, and suicide. All these years later, herring permits are still worth nothing. The price of salmon had been $1.05 a pound before the oil spill. It went down to 8 cents a pound afterward and stayed there for many years. It just recently went up to 35 cents a pound, Anderson-Faulkner said. What made it less valuable? “Perception.”
Exxon spent $400 million on legal fees, Anderson-Faulkner said. The plaintiffs spent $40 million. We can’t be mean to oil companies, she said, but we have to hold them accountable, and keeping the industry safe and preventing more spills requires technology, training, and oversight.
Other oil spills have happened between Valdez and BP. Some of them have involved intervention; in other cases, nature has been left to take care of itself. There are casualties, however. After one spill, she said, sea otters were poisoned when they stirred up materials that had settled on the bottom.
Reaching out to the Gulf
Faulkner-Anderson has a lot of compassion for what the people in the Gulf are experiencing after the BP spill. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration sent her there as an ambassador to about 10 communities. She carried with her a handmade drum to symbolize new ties between Alaska and the Gulf. Attached to the drum were streamers on which communities would write messages that she passed on to other communities.
“In Rome, they killed the messenger,” she would tell them. “Please do not kill me!” Her message was a sad one. “In 20 years, Prince William has no herring.”
The people of the Gulf didn’t understand what “no herring” meant to Prince William Sound, however. She told them to imagine they didn’t have shrimp for years on end. “We can’t survive without our shrimp returning,” they said. Anderson-Faulkner told them they had to be organized and united and look to themselves for recovery. BP is a big company, she said.
Anderson-Faulkner talked about the details of cleaning up an oil spill. The oil in the Gulf is different from the oil that went into Prince William Sound, and it requires a different response. What should people make of the theories and conjectures they hear about the environmental effect of the Gulf disaster? “The lies change,” she said. “I don’t care how much water there is. You can’t mix it with oil and have it be clean.” She doesn’t think there are enough microbes to eat the oil. The damage “affects us all, no matter where we live.”
Anderson-Faulkner sits on many boards, one in the fishing industry. The fishermen there fish only in pristine waters. “We are doing a good job of making sure our food is good,” she said. They put in lots of quality control checks on their own without being required, and today the oil industry has a lot of oversight that wasn’t taking place when the tanker erupted in Prince William Sound.
A contingent from the Gulf region made a visit to Prince William Sound last August to learn how the area had coped with its disaster. The delegation was encouraged to persevere and be ready for a long legal battle that might not bring adequate financial compensation.
The September 2010 Observer, a quarterly publication of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council, said that visitors from the Gulf have felt guilty leaving for Alaska while the crisis was still going on. People in such situations “are soon relieved by what they find,” the Observer quoted Anderson-Faulkner as saying. “They have been so worried but then are pleased and overwhelmed by the amount of information that is available and [the fact] that there are tools here, like the council, that work.”
Several of Anderson-Faulkner’s Grand Marais schoolmates attended her talk. She lived in Grand Marais from the age of four to the age of 17 but has lived back in Alaska for 35 years now.
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