Hi Scot,
Ill do my best to reply to your post and maybe throw some insight into things a bit where I can.
Most of the offshore rigs use an underwater pipeline to get the resource to shore rather than oil tankers. The nature of how the docking takes place, and the potential volume of oil along with a potentially dangerous situation of bringing a ship that close to an oil rig.
I have heard this argument before and I can understand some of the logic behind it. Often times it takes tragedy to prevent further or future tragedy.
I will admit again, this is an emotional and personal issue for me. I fished and hunted as a kid in PWS and on Montague Island before this happened and saw it for what it should be, among the most beautiful places on Earth and at one time, among the most abundant marine ecosystems in the world. I also was flying to Seattle about 2 weeks afterwards and flying over from 25,000 feet, was shocked at the amount of oil to be seen from there. I had several family members involved in the cleanup and have heard the first person accounts of the futility of the efforts.
Now I have been back several times in the last 10 years. I generally have stayed to the south and west of the sound. But when I originally bought my boat from a Cordova fisherman in 2002(who was a former herring fisher who was ruined financially by the spill) and needed to transit the vessel to Seward to be loaded on a barge for shipping to Bristol Bay, myself, my parents, and a deck hand went to the comfort cove area where 2 uncles worked on the cleanup to see for ourselves, and sure enough, just below the surface on miles of beach. Still sat crude oil. The marine life still has not recovered in the north eastern portion. Especially the marine mammals.
So, I guess though, that is hard lessons were learned and another accident like this doesnt happen, then some good has come from the spill. At this point, other than that, when weighing all considerable impacts from the spill, beyond the ecological, the spill did create some wealth from cleanup efforts for a small amount of people. We call them "spillionaires" For the far majority, it has been nothing but economic ruin, subsistence strain, and emotional hardships.
