Valdez on the pristine Prince William Sound
Wednesday 22 May
Named after a Spanish Secretary of the Navy, Antionio Valdes y Basan, Valdez enjoys a breathtaking setting at the tip of a deep-cut fjord in Prince William Sound. The glacial Chugach Mountains rise up all around the city and it is the southern terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline that carries oil south from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Coast
We arrived on a very monochrome grey, overcast morning and were off the boat handy for our walk around the town. There is a lot of history here and a lot to digest today! Out first stop was at the Old Town Exhibit Museum where we were able to watch a wonderful short film about the history of Valdez. Firstly, the scam to lure prospectors off the Klondike Gold Rush trail when some steamship companies promoted the Valdez Glacier Trail as a better route for miners to reach the Klondike gold fields and discover new ones in the Copper River country interior rather than the route from Skagway. The prospectors who believed the promotion, found that they had been deceived. The glacier trail was twice as long and steep as reported, and many men died attempting the crossing, in part by contracting scurvy during the long cold winter without adequate supplies. Secondly the devastating Good Friday earthquake on 27 March 1964 with its colossal 9.2 magnitude. It lasted for nearly four minutes and caused water to slosh in wells in Africa, swimming pools in Puerto Rico and Australia and it caused $2 billion (in today’s current US dollars) worth of damage. Eyewitnesses reported seeing ground “waves” three to four feet high, ground fissures opening and filling with water and then closing, squirting muddy geysers into the air, and generating as many as 20 different local tsunamis which arrived within minutes of the quake. 98 million cubic yards advanced into the sea which displaced a vast amount of water and generated a local tsunami of 30 feet which thankfully travelled away from the town and not towards it. Thirty-two longshoremen were working on the dock unloading cargo from the supply steamship “SS Chena” and perished when the dock collapsed into the ocean in the violent landslide. The Old Town was badly damaged, and a new town site was prepared on more stable ground four miles away. This three-year construction was supervised by the Army Corps of Engineers and 54 of the original houses and buildings were trucked to the new site. The original town was dismantled, abandoned, and eventually burned down.
Next up was a walk around the port and shipping terminal. A huge number of boats and fishing boats, here which seems interesting given that its population is only around 4,000! We passed some fellow cruisers who told us they had just walked the pretty Dock Point Trail and seen a bear – we were off, a very pretty trail with plenty of plants and spruce trees and beautiful views of Mt Francis across the Sound – but alas, thwarted again. No bear in sight, only a little furry squirrel!
Valdez is a very small town with primarily one-level buildings, so it was easy to walk to the Valdez Museum which had some amazing exhibits around the 4,000 prospectors who crossed the Valdez Glacier enroute to the Yukon in Canada. It also had a very informative exhibit and film on the Exxon Valdez, the tanker that ran aground on Bligh Reef as it was leaving Valdez Marine Terminal and spilled some 10.8 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound (some critics maintain it could have been as high as 38 million gallons) in March 1989. The Captain, Joseph Hazelwood, had turned control of the ship over to Third Mate Cousins with instructions to start the return to the southbound lane after passing Busby Island Light. Cousins was not certified to pilot the ship north of Bligh Reef and it struck the Reef puncturing 8 of the ship’s 11 tanks spilling the oil in the first 3 hours. The ecologically sensitive location, season of the year and large scale of this spill resulted in one of the largest environmental disasters in US history. Exxon settled in 1991 in three discrete parts: criminal plea $25 million, criminal restitution $100 million and civil settlement $900 million. The spill affected more than 1,300 miles of this pristine shoreline with immense impacts for fish and wildlife and their habitats, as well as for local industries and communities. The oil killed an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles and as many as 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs. Settlement funds have been used to fund multiple restoration and protection projects through Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska and long-term monitoring research programmes.
The Trans-Alaska pipeline was built from March 1975 and completed in May 1977 to carry oil from the Prudhoe Bay oil fields to a terminal in Valdez. It is 800 miles long, crosses 3 mountain ranges, 500 rivers and streams, is 48 inches in diameter and cost $8 billion dollars to build in 1977.
Our last stop – and we were flagging a bit by now and after so much information – was the Maxine & Jesse Whitney Museum which contains one of the largest collections of Native Alaskan art and artifacts in the world, and an incredible array of taxidermy specimens showing Alaskan animal and bird life which were expertly done and life-sized – looking at some of these animals - maybe it has been good that we haven’t seen any of those bears!!!!!
Back to the boat for a welcome cuppa, we sailed out of Valdez, and past the oil tanker Louisiana which had just left the Valdez Oil Terminal and was being escorted out of the Sound by two tug boats.
And that was it for Valdez – it was quite a day. What seems to be a very small town offered up an incredible amount of history on a lot of different topics.