Customer Reviews

Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having read quite a few books focusing on various disasters in this nation during the past century it certainly comes as no surprise to me that nearly two decades after the calamity in Prince William Sound the people of Cordova, Alaska have yet to be made whole. In my reading I consistantly found that the investigation of these events is more often than not perverted by corporate collusion, broken promises, curious judicial rulings and paid off politicians. It seems that the rich and powerful will resort to any means at their disposal to avoid taking responsibility for their greed, negligence and stupidity. "Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill" is the gut-wrenching story of lost livelihoods, broken families, shattered dreams and a spoiled environment. Author Riki Ott visited Cordova just a few short years before the spill, fell in love with the place and decided to make this town her permanent home. Riki had a PhD in marine biology and was a commerical fisherman to boot. As such, she is someone uniquely qualified to tell the sorry story of the Exxon Valdez tragedy. She knew the right questions to ask and was painfully aware of the likely consequences of the massive oil spill. What has happened to the people of Cordova and the surrounding area will more than likely anger and sadden you.

Oddly enough, as the Exxon Valdez set sail with a full load of crude on the evening of March 23, 1989, Riki Ott was addressing a group of Valdez residents on what would happen should a major spill ever occur. As a matter of fact, Riki put it this way to her audience "Gentlemen, it's not if, it's when." It was not more than an hour or two later that the environmental nightmare that would forever change Prince William Sound would begin. The evidence clearly indicates that Captain Joseph Hazelwood was legally intoxicated when the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef tearing a huge hole in the hull. Official estimates were that more than 11,000,000 gallons of crude leaked into the Sound that night though Riki Ott has reason to believe that the actual amount was closer to 38,000,000 gallons. Response to the disaster from the oil companies was painfully slow and inadequate further exacerbating an already monumental problem. Many of the tools that had been promised by the oil companies to help fight such spills were not available, the victim of reckless and ill-advised cost saving measures by these companies. And it goes without saying that had the Exxon Valdez been a double-hulled tanker the scope of this disaster would have been reduced considerably. The damage done to the environment and to all manner of wildlife was incalculable. Riki Ott saw it all firsthand. Her accounts of the response to this tragedy and the effects on her community are riveting.

In the immediate aftermath, Exxon promised the people of Cordova that they would be made whole. They lied. No one in Cordova could possibly have been prepared for the epic battle for justice that would occur over the next 20 years. Riki Ott was on the scene every step of the way and reports on the tactics employed by the oil companies, state and federal government, the courts and of course the victims. It quickly becomes apparent whose side most of our esteemed government officials are on. Riki Ott also spends a considerable amount of time driving home the point that the oil spill science funded by the oil companies is largely junk science and is not to be trusted. Perhaps one of the most salient points made in "Not One Drop" is that evidence amassed by trauma experts clearly indicates that disasters caused by so-called "acts of God" such as earthquakes, floods and tornadoes affect people much differently in the long run than such man-made disasters as dam failures, oil spills and nuclear accidents. My reading over the years would tend to confirm this. As Riki points out "natural disasters brought people together in crisis, while man-made disasters tore communities apart." Now nearly two decades later the people of Cordova struggle mightily to put their lives and their community back together again.

In my view "Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage In The Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill" is an exceptionally well written and extremely important book. The author has been an eyewitness to all of these events over the years and as such brings a totally unique perspective in reporting on these enduring issues. The litigation goes on. Sadly, some 19 years later more than 6000 of the original litigants in the Exxon Valdez case have passed on. Contrary to what Exxon will tell you Prince William Sound still has not recovered. The herring have never returned. Events have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that procrastination and endless legal maneuvering by Exxon did pay off for them. I guess it was ever thus. If you ever wondered about the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil spill then "Not One Drop" is the book you want to read. And where did Riki Ott come up with the title for her book? Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once promised the concerned citizens of Cordova that "Not One Drop" of oil would ever pollute Prince William Sound. Nuff said? Highly recommended!

The Exxon-Valdez oil spill impacted, among other places, Cordova, Alaska, located on the Prince william Sound. Disasters, Katrina, Chernobyl, Exxon-Valdez cause loss of life and environmental degradation. Damage to social networks is also involved.

Cordova is a small fishing community. The author's father had been among the last students of Aldo Leopold. Following the acquisition of a Ph.D. in marine biology toxicology, the author went partners in a fishing boat in Alaska. Fishermen swap stories, (there are a lot of perfect storms in Alaska). Watching wildlife is a fringe benefit of fishing.

On the AMBERGRIS, the author's boat, neither partner was skipper, they didn't know enough. The second four months of their first fishing season was successful for the author, Riki Ott, and her partner. Riki got to meet other women at the Fishermen's Cooperative barbecue.

The largest oil discovery in North America took place at Prudhoe Bay. Valdez is the terminal of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Ted Stevens claimed to the fishermen that not one drop of oil would touch the waters of Prince William Sound. Valdez, like Cordova, is situated on the sound.

On March 24, 1989, the Exxon-Valdez tanker was grounded off Bligh Reef. Four point five million gallons of oil gushed from the tanker. Oil was two feet higher than the surrounding sea.

Trauma memory trumps other memory. A storm a few days after the grounding on the Bligh Reef pushed oil through the Prince William Sound. (The response plan proved inadequate to the size of the disaster.)

One-third of the fishing fleet worked on the clean-up, but not Riki Ott and her partner. Discussions of whether or not to accept Exxon money eroded social solidarity. Other employers couldn't compete with Exxon's wages. Social chaos outlasted the clean-up. Beaches and workers were damaged in the clean-up. Two-thirds of the frontline crew had respiratory complaints.

In the aftermath of the spill, Exxon sought to reduce corporate liability. Thousands of fishermen filed claims. Post-spill, the oil lobby was a heavy presence in Juneau. The author was ordered to supply the head of the legislative committee knowledge of the science involved to penetrate the double-talk. She had failed to comprehend the brutality of oil politics and on the first day of the hearings had not helped the chairperson sufficiently to enable him to be effective. Lobbyists accused Riki Ott of bringing in the facts!

Damage to wildlife was kept secret by means of a federal gag order, (to enable settlement talks to proceed). In the information vacuum, Exxon launched a public relations offensive. Questions went unanswered for three additional years until the scientific findings of spill results became public. The Coast Guard promised to continue the beach clean-up in 1991.

The 1991 salmon fishing season was ruinous. In 1992 very few salmon arrived at the inlet. Four years after the spill, oil was still present on the beaches. In 1993 wild and hatchery salmon were scarce. Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior, and others supported ecological studies to determine the cause of a dead zone in the Prince William Sound. Twenty-five percent of domestic oil goes through the Alaska pipeline every day.

Five years after the spill only half of the herring had returned to Prince William Sound. The two following years were not good for herring, either. By 1996 some community cohesion had been restored to Cordova. Also, it was a good year for salmon fishing.

Jailed in Texas for attempting to distribute letters to Exxon shareholders, the author was led to feel that Exxon provided wealth for the few at the cost of poverty for many and for plundering the planet. It seems that people and animals were sickened both by the spill and by the clean-up.

The book is riveting.

Fresh out of graduate school, a young Riki Ott sought respite from academia by joining a salmon-fishing crew in Alaska. "Hooked" on the joy and excitement of the salmon runs, she bought a boat with a partner and settled in to build a life for herself as a fisherwoman in Prince William Sound. Making an effort to become part of her new community, she attended a few local political meetings. When the old-timers raised concerns about Alyeska's oil-producing activities, Riki's academic background resurfaced: "Maybe I can help there ... I have a master's in oil pollution and a doctorate in sediment pollution." Her stunned neighbors promptly voted her onto their organization's board, passed her a towering stack of papers, and--in the case of the now-former lead person on the Alyeska issues--made plans to go moose hunting.

Two years later came news headlines about the Exxon-Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, and Riki was right in the middle of the chaos of an entire community's shattered lives. Not One Drop chronicles how, over the next two decades, she and others fought to restore to the families of the small fishing community all that had been stolen when a tanker crashed and broken promises spilled across human lives as thickly as oil coated once-pristine beaches. Riki's firsthand account ranges from makeshift office space to Congressional offices in Washington, DC, from the sweeping wilds of Alaska's remote spaces to the crowded pen of her Dallas prison cell. Everpresent are the friends and neighbors struggling to regain their footing in Cordova, Alaska.

While Riki's uniquely well-informed perspective allows her to tell the story of this accident in a way that sheds light on corporate power-plays and profit-seeking platitudes, her narrative occasionally bogs down in the very literary device that at first seems to make the science and politics truly accessible to a lay reader. Much of her story is told, not directly to the reader, but to her best friend--who asks for clarification and simplification frequently enough that the reader can't possibly get lost in the details. This device can be very effective, but the effect in Not One Drop reminded me a bit of the cheesy management-advice books that rely on questioning characters who find unexpected mentors in trains, airplanes, and amusement parks. The information is great, but the characters feel forced. I'd have preferred that Riki Ott simply continue her narrative as it began, telling her story without the artificial intermediaries of townspeople who ask her to simplify science that's already been adequately explained.

Despite that flaw, I found this book enlightening and informative, an enjoyable read well worth my time. I'd recommend it to anyone who cares about any community or natural space touched by any megacorporations, as the lessons Riki learned in Alaska seem likely to transfer all too well to the site of the next human-made disaster. Perhaps, if enough people read Cordova's story and others like it, that next disaster can be prevented before it destroys a community and an ecosystem.

(Review from the "mother" half of our mother-daughter book review team)

Riki Ott is, to me, a true heroine. Not just because of her tremendous devotion to fight for fair treatment for fishermen, townsfolk and others from Exxon, but because she did it for so long and with such great patience. Evidence of this is in the even-keeled tone of this book, which took me about 10 days to read (and I'm a quick reader) because I kept getting so made at the games Exxon played throughout the whole ordeal that I thought I'd have a heart attack!

One could argue that Exxon's near complete abandonment of any attempts to "do right" after their negligent behavior - and their subsequent getting away with it - gave a green light to Enron, most of America's banks, government contractors like Halliburton (etc) to pillage at will, knowing our legal system is simply not prepared to deal with the scale and complexities of corporate crime . . . nor does anyone really have the time or pocketbooks to fight the fight for what might be decades.

I followed the Exxon Valdez story for years, and I too watched (indirectly, via the media) as Exxon neglected all of its bold promises to repair the damage they did. It was and stays a big heartache for many.

"Not One Drop" works because it tells the basics of the story plainly and without palpable anger. You can feel the fatigue. There is not a lot of characterization or evidence of personal life in the book, but there is just enough to put a good human face on the suffering of Exxon Valdez's many victims. At times, knowing how it all ends makes it tough to relive it all, but I'm glad I did . . . it recharged the batteries of my cynicism in a healthy way!

I read this book for a presentation that I had to do for my MBA program, I never intended to like it. The book was written so that I could understand it, not all scientific terms. I feel for all of the people of Cordova, I had no idea that this was still going on, or that they got a really crappy deal from the US Government, the same government that should have protected them. Riki made everyone so real, and you can feel for them with every new devastating development that "The Big One" brought to them. Now in light of the BP Spill in the gulf I wonder when people are going to realize that water and oil really don't mix.

The term "hero" is too often applied too loosely in describing a person. In the case of Riki Ott, author of "Not One Drop," the term fits perfectly. Riki Ott is trained in marine biology and has been involved in the fishing industry. This background gives her the expertise in analyzing and understanding the tragedy that struck her hometown -- the Exxon Valdez oil spill. After the spill, Ott founded nonprofit organizations and started writing to let the world know the truth and scope of the tragedy that struck her community. "Not One Drop" is a detailed account of how the spill has affected Cordova, Alaska over the past couple decades since the spill took place.

I have to confess that I was quite igorant about the Exxon Valdez oil spill before reading this book. I knew that it was a great environmental tragedy, but beyond that I never gave the subject much thought. "Not One Drop" has certainly educated me immensely, not only on the spill itself, but on the meaning of community and how citizens can take action in the face of great odds. It gives a fairly thorough account of the community, the litigation, and such in a chronological fashion, but this book also has a very broad theme of how Americans should never give up our very dignity and rights to the greed that permeates the corporate elite.

Ott writes in a style that is easy to read, and she is able to explain the legal and science material, that is integral to the book, in a manner that is accessible to laypeople. I never felt lost while reading this incredibly informative book. At the end of "Not One Drop" is a handy ten-page timeline that serves to draw the events together just in case the reader needs to see an overview of all the events that have taken place since the spill.

I truly hope that "Not One Drop" is widely read. It is an important case study that touches upon a plethora of disciplines. Riki Ott is an amazing human being, and this country is better off because of heroes such as her.

The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill happened in 1989. I was in eighth grade. I remember the horror of all that oil rushing over beaches, of blackened seals and sea birds, of people washing animals in dish soap to try and remove the oil. My heart broke for the environment, the animals, and the people who relied on fishing and the ocean for their livelihood. In Not One Drop, Ms. Ott brings back not only the horror of those days, but also what led up to them and what came after.

It would have been too easy to make a book like this nothing but a dry recital of facts and figures. There certainly would have been enough of them to fill several tomes. Instead, the information is interspersed with human stories. Not one life in the small Alaskan town of Cordova went untouched in the years before, and the years after the spill, and the author tells their story with a spartan, poignant grace.

And although there's a political message in this book, it's not heavy handed. Those of us who tend to agree with it, will find ourselves nodding our head. Others may have to stop and think and wonder. I found myself drawn along with the tale, knowing how parts of it would end, unsure about others. I found myself caring and rooting for the people of Cordova, Alaska. This is a powerful moving book about an environmental disaster, a town, and the people who did what they had to do to save the town, and the people, that they loved.

Rikki Ott wrote this book before the banks crashed, houses foreclosed, thousands of people lost their jobs all in the economic crisis of fall of 2008. But her book is a play by play experience of how greed in America is destroying everything for everybody. Destroying our economy now, but destroying our environment in her story. She did fantastic research and wrote in painstaking detail how Exxon covered up the extent of the destruction and kept true knowledge of the disaster from reaching the public. Doesn't that make you sick? Once again, as Exxon CEOs collected million dollar bonuses, fish and birds died and an entire town lost their living. Her book would be almost unbelievable if we didn't see this happening all around us now. I'm giving it 5 stars for its presentation and courage -- but wouldn't it be nice if someone figured out how to change these corporations? Rikki Ott's anger is the anger all of us feel at our helpessness in the face of corporate destruction. Good-bye to a way of life. Good-bye to a fishing village. Good-bye American values. This book is not for the faint of heart. The news from the front is not good.

This is a very intriguing book... the perspective on the environmental issues goes a long way towards bridging the gap between the groups favoring big-business rights to profits and the environmentalists who take them on.

It really points out the damage to the economy that trampling on environmental issues creates. For pro-business readers and thinkers it really points out the damage to small business owners when big business rides rough-shod over people.

I think that it should make some individuals reconsider their positions on "tree-huggers" and environmental issues. It's easy to forget that the environment isn't some separate entity that exists in a vacuum and has no impact on daily life or the economy. This is a well-written tale that details the damage to local economies when the environment is damaged.

Of course it also details the personal struggles of the affected population and the damages that nature sustains when promises are broken. This is important and compelling but it is unfortunately not likely to change perspectives. I think the most effective tale is that of livelihoods lost and long term financial security destroyed. I think it ought to help pro-business thinkers to confront whether they are pro-all-business or just pro-big-business... and at least consider their reasoning.

My biases are pretty obvious but I do think that everyone, regardless of their biases, will get something out of the book. It's an easy read, the tales are gripping, the facts are frightening, and the ending is sad.

Worth every minute to read.

The history and insight into the oil and fishing industry in Alaska were huge pluses in this book, all written by a woman who found herself immersed in one of the most infamous environmental disasters of all time. This book was truly hard to read at times, given the devastating nature of the material, and the frustration of the author can be felt by the reader as the issue and conflict goes on year after year. The only negative I have about the book is the inertia that seems to set in at times when the facts of certain situations seem to overload the story, and as the author tires to remain true to what happened, I felt lost in the confusion and illogical nature of what was taking place. I really felt for what she went through, and for what the people of Cordova continue to deal with today. It was the first account of the accident I've ever written where I really felt like I could comprehend what had happened and what it meant for the locals, wildlife, and the global environment.