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Laurel's Full Interview

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Laurel Hilts, Seldovia, Alaska, Born 1970

Okay, my name is Laurel Hilts and I grew up in Seldovia, spending my summers in Kotzebue, and I live in Seldovia, Alaska. 1989, I would have been 19 years old, in college.  Yeah, I can actually see in my mind’s eye, you know, news reports where they showed this map of the Southcentral region of Alaska with a picture imbedded on it of the Exxon Valdez. I was in college in L.A., in the dorm setting, so it wasn’t that I necessarily had a lot of access to television, but it was there.

I think probably, first for me would have just been simply concern about the oil that was going into the water, shock and awe, but then just frustration at the stupidity that would have led to it.  You know, actually, in hindsight I don’t really feel that I knew too much about [Seldovia]. I would say the big thing I knew was that the oil traveled quickly and covered a big distance in a quick manner, so my perspective from L.A. was that the coastline of California had been covered in 4 days, comparatively.  So my time was being spent explaining the concept to people, of the size and the scale of it. I did have a sense that there might be, there was concern that there would be wrap-around oil, wrap up around the end of the Peninsula, towards Seldovia, but it wasn’t like a big pressing concern as much as it was just how quickly it was flowing the coastline going down towards Kodiak.

Yeah, I don’t remember whether or not I came home in the summer at all, because typically we were in Kotzebue [in the summers], so I would have come home at Christmas time.  I don’t know when the clean-up started, but I definitely was really aware of the fact that my father had been hired on to be involved in the clean-up and he was involved in being on the beach with clean-up there and talked about living on a boat and living with a few men. That was what was happening for the community of Seldovia, was that anybody and everybody who owned a boat, their boats were being rented for the purpose of the clean-up and then the men were going and working, and women I assume, were going and working.  There was a substantial financial gain for all the people that owned these boats and substantial income for the people who had the opportunity to go and work, but it was mingled with the grief and the sorrow of what they were seeing.

So, no, they didn’t necessarily see a ton of oil come into Seldovia and impact Seldovia, but they were seeing their region devastated.  And then the great frustration that they had in the requirements of the clean-up and the futility of it, where they felt that they were just moving oil from one place to the other.  And they were constrained by the requirements and so the men were really frustrated.  I think that, if you could have taken a common-sense approach where you allowed the local experts, the local people to say, “This is what needs to be done,” I think that maybe the initial clean-ups would have been a little more effective. Not to say that the trauma of it wouldn’t have happened.

Now, if I can give you my perspective from college.  I was on a forensics team, a speech and debate team.  I was pretty bad at preparing in advance.  I would just wing it, so I’m really good at impromptu speeches, but if it has to be prepared and planned out, you have a time limit.  So I did a speech on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. I had pictures that came out of National Geographic, whatever and a big display. I talked about the impacts. I showed how the California coastline compared to the area of the spill. I gave them comparative data. I spoke about the impacts.  I showed the sea otters, you know, the whole thing.  I culminated the whole speech with the fact that I was from Seldovia, Alaska. It was impacting, because, here I am just this person in L.A. giving this information about this thing, and then I’m like, “Hey, the reality is, I’m from there.”  And it was a great impact. The problem was I think the speech should have been four minutes and I think it was eight or twelve, so I got in trouble from the coach. But everybody was like, “But the speech was awesome!” My thing was just for them to be informed and educated, because a blurb on the news -- and I’m going to give you a weird comparison: my brother had died by being washed off of a crabber and drowning at sea here in Alaska, and it was a blurb on the news, boom, this guy died, in that instant, and I remember it triggering for me that that little thing never could represent the hugeness of losing somebody -- but still, I can see in my minds’ eye that map, I think there is nothing that can show you, comparatively the grief and the sorrow and the issues that resulted because of that spill, it just doesn’t match.  So, for me, doing the speech was important, not important enough to time myself and do it in the right timeframe [laughs].  Had I timed myself, I would have advanced and I would have been able to give the speech again and then I would have advanced and I would have given it one more time, so a missed opportunity to share that was my fault.  My coach chewed me out, for sure.

So I don’t really know about the ecology other than I know that the Bay changed from the ‘70s to today, and so we have over time things change.  But I just feel like I used to go to Inside Beach, which is Linder’s Beach, and being able to turn a rock over and find small starfish, and that’s changed.  I don’t know if that’s directly related to oil spill or if it’s just the temperature of the Bay changed in the ‘70s and everything changed over time. I’m not really sure of that. Because I didn’t summer here, my time on the water was less.

But as far as fisheries and impact on individual boats or families, I think that change and not having the access to the fishery for so long, I think that change impacted the community.  Over time, we’ve seen a big shift from commercial fishing being a large piece of our community to being not a large piece at all, and seeing boats eventually, leasing out IFQ’s, what have you.  How much of that is attributable to the oil spill, I don’t know, because I don’t know where every boat goes.

But then, on the flip side, you have the settlement and then you have a surplus of cash, an influx of cash, and that benefits the community.  Not that it balances out ever when nature’s impacted, but both ways affect it.

I don’t have a sense that it [oil] came into Seldovia, and so it wouldn’t have changed my community experience.  If I was, you know, going to Cordova after the oil spill, you know, it would have been the whole table conversation at every coffee shop in town.

But what I would say is that for some people who had the naturalist tendency, drawn towards things of science, what have you, for them it was probably life-changing in such a way that it inspired them to greater things.  And so, to take Bret Higman as an example, I think that’s a classic example of somebody who as a kid, hiked every trail, made his own trails, lived on the rocks, lived along the water.  It would have greatly impacted him.  He’s younger than me; he would have been in school at the time.  You can see how his love of nature and everything drew him to the career that he has today, and so he’s advocating against Pebble Mine, he’s advocating that we protect our natural environment from the way that we extract resources.  So, I would say Bret is your go-to guy. I think for people like that it had to have been life-altering, because they were living it out, they were watching it all, reading the Homer News. We weren’t on Facebook, we weren’t social networking, we didn’t have cable, we probably, I would say at the time we had NBC, CBS, PBS and ABC, that’s all the TV we would have had.  Everything would have been the local reports and whatever was on the national news.  Everything was word of mouth and you just lived it, and so I think for them that would have been the big changer, just being as aware as possible.

What do you tell a child to prepare them for the potential of trauma?  Do I want them to begin to experience the trauma before it happens? Everybody’s a clean slate until that first trauma happens in their life and we’d rather protect them from it.  So, if I had two months warning that something was going to happen, I would rather spend my efforts and time addressing it, preventing it if possible.  Then if we need to protect the children I think that’s an automatic, we just know where to go, know what to do.  But I don’t have anybody whispering in my ear two months in advance of a trauma, so the best thing is that our community be whole and healthy and able to support not only our children, but everybody in a crisis. That’s where the ’64 earthquake or rallying around the spill and the clean-up, I think that’s where we see that.  Anywhere, I think you’ll see the same thing.  Well, I guess, maybe the caveat is maybe we didn’t see the same thing in Louisiana when the hurricane came and maybe we didn’t see it in Mississippi and maybe in the clean-up we didn’t see it.  I don’t know because I wasn’t there on the ground, and I think that some of the louder voices are going to say the negatives.  I do know that when Hurricane Katrina went through, my brother went to Louisiana. I do know that when people went to Houston, my friend Tina, at her church, fed people every day.  So I think things happen that don’t necessarily get the big television push.

The earthquake was our big thing and it was always, the school was the safe place. I don’t think we spend enough time telling the kids that kind of stuff.  So, in Seldovia, I would say clarification of where safe places are.  Communication here is an issue, you know, if we’re reliant on cell service, what do you do in a disaster?  We actually have a population that extends miles out of the city limits and they reach a point where they don’t have good cell coverage.  We’re learning today that our emergency services, they’re trying to use cell phones to do the dispatch and they can’t because there’s people who are involved in dispatch who don’t have good service.  We have constraints because before everything was a CB, and everybody had a CB and you just called and everybody heard it.  Now we have this great technology, but it’s not reliable.  So that’s something that we just as a whole have to always look at.

Each emergency that happens makes us stronger, if we survive it.  But at the same time, regulations and monitoring can’t always guarantee that stupidity doesn’t happen. I’m not one to say, well, don’t use fossil fuels, I’m not going to say that. If somebody has an answer that replaces it in a way that doesn’t cost me more. I just spent $500 to put 95 gallons of oil in my fuel tank, that’s ridiculous, so obviously it’s expensive.  But we have a whole load of oil waiting in Alaska to be tapped, so I just can’t play that game of don’t use fossil fuels. I think for sure what came out of it, as far as in a clinical side, was greater knowledge of how to protect and prevent, if possible.

I think the fact that technology has improved is important.  And we wish it hadn’t been at the hands of an oil spill, but I think the double-hulled technology has improved safety in that.  I think that our skills and our training for the SOS team or the responders has improved because of something like the oil spill.

What I knew [after the spill] is that Seldovia developed a Seldovia Oil Spill Response Team and that we had plans for booms and you saw lots of booms around and whatever the materials were that were needed for sopping up oil, what have you.  Seldovians had rallied and come up with this organization.  I don’t know what funding sources were out there, what initiated it, but to this day SOS is present and is just a fact, whereas prior to the oil spill that wouldn’t have existed at all.  So as far as our knowledge and our ability to say we choose to protect our waters in our area, that’s been a really important piece for the community.

I see a lot of people who are specifically involved and they’ve had need to respond for vessels that are leaking and, even in our harbor.  So you’ll see the orange float coats going out and people working on it.  And they do a fundraiser once a year, I think, a potluck fundraiser.  But I’m not too closely involved with it.  It was kind of one of those thing that it was established while I was gone and there’s a core group that does it and my focuses are in other areas.

I think having SOS and having people on call, ready to serve if need be, I think that, is a change from the former community perspective.  Kids being raised in that, just recognizing to not assume that everything’s going to work out fine and be prepared in case something bad happens.  I think you can take any situation, the fact that in 1964 our ground dropped 4-6 feet, that changed forever those kids’ thinking about life in Seldovia. So, with each dramatic change you have to make that change in your own thinking, whether or not it’s tangible.