| Alaska scenery | Music | 00:00 |
| Oil spill | BOWDEN: It was an ugly event in a very pretty place. | 00:10 |
| Prince William sound – scenery, animals | STEVE SMITH: Prince William Sound was just pristine, was just America’s finest piece of salt water. It was just a magical place and to have all that oil floating around in it, it was kind of like having your sixteen-year-old daughter raped by the Hell’s Angels. | 00:18 |
| Smith | I mean just, can’t tell you how bad it made you feel. | 00:37 |
| Prince William Sound waters | Music | 00:41 |
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| BOWDEN: Prince William Sound on the South Coast of Alaska, with its crystal clear bays, surrounded by snow-covered mountains. | 00:46 |
| Cordova marina | The fishing village of Cordova nestled on the Sound’s eastern edge, was spared the oil but not its impact. Accessible only by air or sea, the town is coming to life again after the cold, quiet winter months. | 00:54 |
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| STEVE SMITH: Eighty-eight was one of the biggest fishing years I ever had | 01:12 |
| Smith | and then ‘89 came along and it all went down the drain. | 01:15 |
| Cordova marina | BOWDEN: In the past, locals like Steve Smith would have already been out by now, hauling in the first herring catch of the year, but most boats remain idle. Everything started to change for this community on Good Friday 1989. They call it ‘the day the water died’. | 01:20 |
| Exxon Valdez file footage of oil spill | CAPTAIN HAZELWOOD: [Radio call] We fetched up hard around the north of Goose island… evidently we’ve got some oil and we’re going to be here for a while. | 01:39 |
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| BOWDEN: As it turned out, more than forty million litres of crude oil spewed into the waters and along coastlines for hundreds of kilometres. | 01:53 |
| Smith. Super: | STEVE SMITH: We didn’t know if we’d ever fish again. We thought maybe our whole water ecology was poisoned to the extent that our whole fishing careers were done. | 02:07 |
| Smith on boat | BOWDEN: Long time fisherman Steve Smith helped with the clean up. STEVE SMITH: Lots of grown men were crying, | 02:22 |
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| heartbreaking. It’s cost a lot of folks a lot of money and a lot of grief over time and it’s not been settled. | 02:28 |
| Exxon Valdez file footage. Clean up | BOWDEN: The super tanker’s owner, Exxon, now ExxonMobil, paid a total of $3.5 billion US dollars in clean up costs, fines and compensation, but people affected by the spill claim the compensation of about fifteen thousand dollars each wasn’t enough. They sought punitive damages, and in 1994 a jury awarded five billion dollars; the oil giant has been fighting that decision ever since. | 02:39 |
| Cohen. Super: | KEN COHEN: The issue is, should further punishment be meted out on ExxonMobil in this instance? And we believe, and the business community in this country believes, the answer is no. | 03:06 |
| Fisher. Super: | JEFF FISHER: Exxon obviously doesn’t want to pay any money and obviously is going to make every argument available to it under law to delay that. Every day that Exxon doesn’t pay this judgment, it is better off than the day before. | 03:16 |
| Exxon Valdez photos | Music | 03:28 |
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| BOWDEN: After a series of appeals by Exxon, the punitive damages were reduced to $2.5 billion. That would have meant about $75,000 each for the people in the class action, but the company sought a further review and now the case has reached the highest court in the land, the increasingly pro-business US Supreme Court and the fishermen fear they could end up with nothing. | 03:32 |
| Fisher outside Supreme Court | Stanford Law Professor Jeff Fisher has been doing battle for the Alaskans in the Supreme Court. | 04:03 |
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| JEFF FISHER: These are not people looking for a handout in any way. | 04:08 |
| Fisher | Their livelihoods were devastated by this spill. That’s what we proved to a jury at trial and that’s why a jury came back with a very serious award, and all we’ve spent the last thirteen years trying to do is collect on the award that the jury gave them. | 04:11 |
| Boat yard | MIKE MAXWELL: Not only was it a great business, it was a great way of life and it was just ripped away from us. | 04:25 |
| Exxon. Super: | It just went away. Exxon says that everything’s coming back and everything’s fine, fishermen have been paid – it’s a lie. It’s an absolute lie. | 04:36 |
| Pan over water | BOWDEN: Mike Maxwell’s story or a very similar one can be heard time and again in Cordova. | 04:48 |
| Maxwell tying nets | Before the oil spill he had a successful business fishing for herring but in 1993, four years after the spill, the herring disappeared. | 04:55 |
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| MIKE MAXWELL: There’s fifty thousand dollar nets sitting all over this town that will never be used again unless | 05:05 |
| Maxwell | something drastic happens out there. It’s gone. There were fishermen who lost their boats, all their gear, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, just worthless. BOWDEN: Mike Maxwell lost his summer | 05:10 |
| Maxwell tying nets | fishing income and his winter job repairing herring nets. MIKE MAXWELL: Boy, the | 05:24 |
| Maxwell | depression that people go through, I’ve been there myself, years of depression. | 05:29 |
| Bowden and Maxwell in boat yard | BOWDEN: He eventually declared bankruptcy. | 05:35 |
| Maxwell | MIKE MAXWELL: We were upset about the compensatory money. We didn’t think it was enough just because of future damages, no herring coming back mainly, permit and boat devaluation, but we figured that with the large punitive damage award it would cover what we didn’t get in compensation. | 05:38 |
| Smith | STEVE SMITH: We got paid for that first year when we didn’t fish, | 05:58 |
| Boats in harbour | but that’s a long time ago. | 06:02 |
| Smith | BOWDEN: And at that point no one knew. STEVE SMITH: At that point, no one knew that the herring were going to be, you know, such a problem. | 06:05 |
| Smith on boat | BOWDEN: Steve Smith who fished salmon as well as herring managed to keep his business afloat but he slowly ate into his retirement savings. | 06:15 |
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| STEVE SMITH: My permit was worth two hundred thousand dollars, it’s worth nothing now. | 06:24 |
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| BOWDEN: How important is it that this money comes through? STEVE SMITH: Well, it’s very important really, but | 06:28 |
| Smith. Super: | I really don’t have much faith in it, in it being anything but a token. I think they’re going to cut it down to virtually nothing. | 06:35 |
| Statue of fisherman | I don’t think there’s a fishermen here that wouldn’t rather have fished, than get a court settlement. | 06:46 |
| Photos. Cordova fishing fleet | Music | 06:54 |
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| BOWDEN: The herring industry had been worth twelve million dollars a year. The argument continues over whether the oil spill was the sole cause of the decline. PROF GARY THOMAS: There’s plenty of evidence that showed that there was damage to juvenile, both juvenile and adult herring, | 06:57 |
| Thomas | physical damage… BOWDEN: Professor Gary Thomas | 07:16 |
| Miami shots | is now based at the University of Miami on the other side of the country, but in the ‘90s he went to | 07:19 |
| Thomas in office | Alaska to unravel the mystery of the herring decline. He says it started with the oil spill, then came poor management. PROF GARY THOMAS: So you’ve got two things | 07:25 |
| Thomas Super: | going on, you’ve got oil damage and oil affected natural mortality rates that weren’t recognised and second you got some of the biggest fishing effort and the heaviest exploitation ever after the oil spill. So what else would you expect in 1993 that the fish were knocked down to virtual zero. | 07:36 |
| ExxonMobil exterior | BOWDEN: ExxonMobil’s Vice President of Public Affairs, | 07:55 |
| Cohen. Super: | Ken Cohen, who’s been defending the company’s position for nineteen years now, disagrees. KEN COHEN: As herring fisheries not only in Alaska, but in other parts of the north west, are suffering from the effects of a virus, that has nothing to do with the spill and that’s a scientific fact. | 07:58 |
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| BOWDEN: You know that other scientists dispute that. KEN COHEN: Well, all credible science supports what I just told you. | 08:16 |
| Thomas | PROF GARY THOMAS: This is just really pretty much a fantasy story. It’s not practical. The fish can’t disappear like they’re telling the public. Their explanation just isn’t practical. | 08:22 |
| Seaplane flight | BOWDEN: To find out more about the recovery of the area’s ecosystem, we flew 140 km West to the Village of Chenega Bay. After the spill the local food sources of native Alaskans | 08:37 |
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| here, became toxic overnight. PETE KOMPKOFF: This was just covered with oil. There were booms set up all along this shore, all along this whole bay here. | 08:51 |
| Oil on rocks at Sleepy Bay | BOWDEN: Council President Pete Kompkoff then took us to nearby Sleepy Bay, which had oil a metre deep on its shores. | 09:03 |
| Kompkoff smells rock | PETE KOMPKOFF: [Smells rock on shoreline] Still smells like oil. | 09:16 |
| Kompkoff shows oil on gloves | BOWDEN: ExxonMobil describes Prince William Sound as healthy, robust and thriving and states there has been no long-term damage. Pete Kompkoff who’s lived here all his life, sees a very different picture. | 09:20 |
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| PETE KOMPKOFF: The invertebrates or whatever’s living down in the Bay here… and somebody else comes along and eats that little critter, you know it goes up the food chain so it still worries me somewhat. | 09:37 |
| Seaplane flight | BOWDEN: But the people of Cordova have taken on more than the world’s largest publicly traded oil company. Big business across the US has a vested interest in the result of this case. | 09:53 |
| Fisher. Super: | JEFF FISHER: There has been a longstanding campaign in the US, ten or fifteen years now, where business has been trying to persuade the Supreme Court that punitive damages are inherently suspect, and for them to cut back, if not eliminate, on the availability of punitive damages. The Exxon case is the culmination of those efforts. | 10:05 |
| Cohen. Super: | BOWDEN: So is your real concern the precedent it sets? KEN COHEN: Yes. | 10:23 |
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| KEN COHEN: All business. In fact all, all defendants in civil litigation in this country will be closely watching what the court does with this case. | 10:30 |
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| BOWDEN: Did you ever think of just paying the punitive damages and moving on for the sake of the company’s reputation? | 10:39 |
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| KEN COHEN: No. We are entrusted with careful stewardship of the shareholders’ money and this standard, the rule of law and when is it appropriate for punitive damages to be awarded, is extremely important. | 10:44 |
| Ext. ExxonMobil | BOWDEN: But it is a PR disaster. Every time this is in the news, your company is the villain, the big corporation versus the little guy. | 10:56 |
| Cohen | KEN COHEN: If you look at what the company has done since when the spill occurred, and certainly as I have told you, it was a tragic accident. It’s one that the company very much regrets… BOWDEN: This is the company line and Ken Cohen sticks to it. | 11:03 |
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| KEN COHEN: This is a tragic accident. It’s one that we have accepted responsibility for. When a company is confronted with a tragic incident of this type… It was a tragic accident, one which the company very much regrets. | 11:16 |
| Cordova marina | BOWDEN: What do you say to the people who argue that their lives have never been the same, they either went bankrupt, their businesses went down the drain and they blame Exxon. | 11:32 |
| Cohen | Do you care? KEN COHEN: Of course we care, but again this is why the courts -- all of those issues were before the court and all -- and the court found that the plaintiffs have been, all compensatory damages, including the damages you just described, had been met. | 11:41 |
| Cordova town shots/Graveyard | BOWDEN: As the legal case has dragged on, 20% of the plaintiffs, more than 6,000 people have died. Many others have suffered depression, marriage breakdowns – the Mayor at the time of the spill committed suicide, mentioning the event in a note he left behind. | 11:58 |
| Cordova residents with dogs | While we were in Cordova, ExxonMobil announced its profits for the first three months of the year -- almost eleven billion dollars. That has | 12:22 |
| Fishing boat | nothing to do with this case, but when the Alaskans consider that their pay out would only equal about three week’s profit for the company, it doesn’t make them feel any better. STEVE SMITH: That’s what’s very depressing, | 12:31 |
| Smith. Super: | because we live in what’s supposed to be this wonderful democracy and find out that they’ve purposely infiltrated the court with pro-business people and they don’t give a damn about justice. | 12:43 |
| Exxon. Super: | MIKE MAXWELL: It almost makes us feel like the politicians think that we’re lying to them about our businesses, about the Sound’s health, the herring – so it’s a pretty tough deal. We have no trust for our corporations in our law system. | 12:57 |
| Maxwell at work | BOWDEN: Mike Maxwell is working seven days a week trying to catch up and he’s trying to look forward not back but it’s a struggle. MIKE MAXWELL: If it would have been over within | 13:15 |
| Maxwell. Super: | four or five years, instead of dragging on through nineteen years of misery for a lot of people, you know, we probably could have gotten over it, but just the unfairness of the length of the appeals process, you know, Exxon’s won. BOWDEN: Morally, | 13:27 |
| Cohen | have you handled this well? KEN COHEN: Yes. We accept this is a tragic incident, one which we took responsibility for. | 13:46 |
| Centenary party | BOWDEN: Today Cordova’s residents have come together to celebrate the town’s centenary. They’re hoping that the end of legal proceedings will allow them to move on and plan the next phase of their lives. But for some, the day the water died, has changed things forever. | 14:00 |
| Credits: | Reporter: Tracy Bowden Camera: Louie Eroglu Editor: Woody Landay | 14:33 |