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Casey's Full Interview

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Full Interview

Casey Moss

Homer, Alaska

My name is Casey Moss, I’m from Homer, Alaska – born and raised, and I was born in 1983, so I was six when the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill occurred.

Because I was six, I was going out [on the boat] for a week at the most at a time, or a couple of days.  You know, the grandparents, they would take me out and drop me off and pick me up later in the day, because who wants a six year old on the boat while you’re actually trying to be productive and get stuff done? I didn’t really notice it because I was out there, on the water, on the boat for such short periods of time.

Obviously we were still out fishing, but you hear about, well this is going to affect us in the long run or “how is this going to affect us in the long run?” but I don’t actually remember how it did affect us or if, those years – you know the couple years after it -- were bad fishing years.   You know, I really don’t have any memory of having personal experience with it, except picking up on the frustration level and wanting something to be fixed or done or made better or anything.

I do remember being out on my father’s fishing boat and going out on the bay, here, Kachemak Bay, and going along and seeing this kind of glob in the water.  We pulled up beside it and one of the deckhands leaned over, and kind of picked it up, and it’s just like this gob of goo basically.  And so I remember that. It was sort of like “whoa.”  Being from a fishing community you realize that it’s all kind of interconnected, but it also seems like Kachemak Bay should be a little bit disconnected from it as well.  You don’t expect it to really affect here as much as it is affecting over there.

I remember the videos and watching it on TV and seeing the people, slogging around on the beaches just in Grundens or raingear or Tyvek suits or whatever it is and just covered in oil and picking up eagles and seabirds and sea otters and sea creatures, just everything that just kind of ended up washing up on the beach from it.  So I don’t know, I don’t know if it necessarily ever really affected me, but there is some pretty impressive visual images that came from it, like the enormity of the whole process. 

I’m pretty sure that my dad was fairly angry.   I think there’s a lot of anger that goes along with it because of the stupidity of the situation in and of itself.  I mean there’s no reason in the world that it should have ever happened. There are precautions, there are safety measures, you know. How many times had ships gone through that area correctly and not hit the fricking reef.  It’s just kind of one of those deals where I think the anger of it, or frustration maybe, I don’t know about anger but definitely frustration that this could be allowed to happen to begin with.  You know, wanting, wanting him [the captain] to get some sort of punishment. And wanting Exxon to make it right or at least put a lot of effort into making it right.  Part of it is just disgust. Pretty much the anger in the community at how this has happened and how it is going to affect a fishing community’s livelihood basically.  Even though it was far away, sort of, ish, the impact that it had all over the area and just the frustration all the fishermen had and, “how is this going to affect us?”  And just, yah, the enormity of the situation and the backlash from it.  Just how bad it could actually be for everybody in the years to come.  And I think part of it probably came, frustration wise, at how inadequate the entire process, clean-up process, seemed to be. You get all these boats and whatnot that were hired to go out there and clean up and do what they could and it didn’t get anybody anywhere.  So I think that, yah, frustration from this whole process was extremely high.  A few years ago, they dug on some of those beaches again and you know, what, five, six inches down or a foot down still found oil.  I mean its just crazy how long lasting and detrimental it really can be or is.  And that there’s really no sure way of ever fixing it and going back to the way that it was beforehand.  

I think it’s just one of those topics of conversation. It just comes up a lot right after the fact.  Back to that whole, you know, “What are we going to do, how is this going to affect us?”  It’s just sort of like, “What’s the next step? How do we move forward? How do we, you know, how do we make this right again?” 

I guess to me it kind of seemed like it was one of those things where it is what it is at this point.  They’ve done what can be done and unfortunately it’s not as much as needed to be done

You know, I think for me – because I’m kind of a crazy animal person -- I think some of what is making you feel like it was somewhat better is watching the whole clean-up process on the survived animals, the ones that they found alive and were able to rehabilitate and get back out there.  I think that kind of is trying to return normalcy to it. Give it some sort of, all hope hasn’t been lost.  There’s still little bits and pieces that have survived this and will be able to make it back out there and can hopefully continue the path. But I don’t know at all anything larger than that really.  Just, you know, I think you have to take the little pieces for what you can, the little, the small battles.  I guess what’s the phrase – you may have lost the war but you’ve won the battle kind of deal, because that’s definitely how these things work.  It’s detrimental and the war is definitely lost, but you’ve got these kind of little rays of hope in the middle where it’s like, okay this has returned to what it once was. This is back out there where it should be, how it should be.  So it is kind of what you can get out of it.

I think probably that looking back on it and seeing the small, small battles came probably later in life.  But I remember hearing that some of the seals that were recovered were taken over to the cove, Halibut Cove, and brought back and released back into the wild.  Some of them were around for a while, a long time.  I remember seeing Cinco around in the harbor and whatnot.  He was a pup when it happened.  They found him and rehabilitated him, and he was hanging out in Kachemak Bay.

As hard as it is, you’ve got to move on.  Dwelling on it doesn’t make it better, doesn’t make it go away, doesn’t fix it, doesn’t help it.  You just get kind of stuck in it and there’s no way.  You continue to be angry and frustrated at this, what’s occurred and there’s just, there’s no stopping it. I think you just kind of have to take what you’ve gotten and just kind of try and put the pieces back together for what they are and move on.  Which I know is so much easier said than done, so much easier.  And I don’t want it to sound like no one can do anything about it, because there are people that are working hard to make to try and fix it, and get things right and whatnot.  But I think as a child in a community like that, there’s not as much that you can do with the resources that you have on hand.  Granted, there are some very, very resourceful children out there that will come up with who knows, some fantastic idea, simple way of changing something, and more power to them for being able to see that possibility and work with it. But I think you’ve got to just pick up the pieces and continue on your way and try and make sure that it never happens again.  If that means being a thorn in the side of some corporation who is not as careful, then that’s kind of what it is.  But I don’t know that that is necessarily a child’s role. As a child you should probably just try and help keep going, try to move on and say we can live through this, we can make it better, we can survive this.