CA Traveler wrote:
Unfortunately that is the wrong side on the story. I would never trade the that disaster for any number of created jobs.
Sorry fanrgs, I like your geology reports etc but disagree with your post.
JMHO
I just reported what many of the locals told me first-hand. I didn't say it was what I thought. I worked in the environmental cleanup business for 30 years of my 45-year career, so I know an environmental disaster when I see one. And the
Exxon Valdez was certainly one of the biggest long-term environmental disasters in our recent history, but perhaps no bigger than the recent blowout of BP's drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. It was not nearly as deadly to Alaskans as the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake. And no one knows how much environmental damage that earthquake caused in Anchorage, Valdez, Seward, Whittier, Kodiak, and other places as far away as Crescent City, California because there was no EPA in the 1960's.
One of the difficulties of environmental cleanup is balancing hazards to animals and plants vs. hazards to people. Love Canal, New York; Times Beach, Missouri; and Libby, Montana, kllled or sickened many more people than the
Exxon Valdez or the
Deepwater Horizon. And we still don't know how many "downwinders" died from cancer caused by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada. If the government is footing the bill, rather than private enterprise, hazards to people get the funding every time. And that will be the case until animals get the vote.
