Spill Science & Technology Bulletin, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp.
3–6, 2002
PII: S1353-2561(02)00060-9
Beyond Crisis Science and
Emergency Legislation: What Do
We Really Know About Oil Spills q
Environmental legislation in the United States and
elsewhere is often debated and passed as ‘‘emergency
legislation’’ in response to environmental disasters
that receive sensational media coverage. Therefore,
the management and organization charts, as well as
environmental programs of regulatory and enforce-
ment agencies, often look like layers of an onion, with
the last layer being the most recent issue of concern, or
chemical of the month or year. The US Oil Pollution
Act of 1990, which was adopted in response to the
Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS), is a striking but not
atypical example of such legislation. It may be an
unfortunate fact of politics that it takes a ‘‘crisis’’ to
stimulate legislation or regulation in practically any
area of public policy.
Yet, there is no reason to assume that legislators
and government agencies ‘‘get it right’’ the first time,
particularly given the highly charged nature of the
politics that lead to emergency legislation. In the case
of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, environmental politics
was immediately polarized by the adversarial relation
between environmental groups, on the one hand, and
representatives of the oil and shipping industries on
the other. Federal and state government agencies were
placed under intense scrutiny by the press and by
members of Congress regarding how quickly they re-
sponded to the oil spill and how well they were
‘‘cleaning up’’ the oil spill. Simultaneously, media
q
The Guest Co-editors of this special issue, as well as the
participants of the Conference, extend their special thanks to
Shawna E. Sweeney, Senior Research Associate at the Center for
Policy Analysis, who served as the Conference Coordinator and
Managing Assistant for the special issue. Neither the conference, nor
the special issue would have been possible without her tireless and
talented efforts.
Ó 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain
1353-2561/02 $ - see front matter
pundits, elected officials, and citizens questioned why
government and industry were unable to prevent the
oil spill.
Members of Congress and the President were also
under intense pressure from citizens to respond to the
crisis, to restore the environment to its ‘‘natural’’
condition as quickly as possible, and to prevent similar
events in the future. The public was shocked by pic-
tures of struggling birds, dead fish, ugly oil slicks, and
sound bytes from distraught and angry residents of
Prince William Sound. At the core of the political and
media debate about EVOS was a recurring ques-
tion––‘‘How could this happen?’’––a question based
on the assumption that accidents are preventable and
should therefore not happen if government had re-
quired industry to take the appropriate preventive
measures. The assumption behind this question set in
motion a process that could only conclude with the
assignment of blame and by holding accountable those
individuals and institutions deemed responsible for the
oil spill. Amidst this cacophony, new legislation was
passed for the purpose of preventing, or at least
minimizing, similar events in the future.
The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA 90) was de-
signed to reduce the probability of oil spills (e.g.,
double hull vessels) and to create a system of con-
tainment and clean up for oil spills. The law estab-
lishes liability for clean up costs and for damages,
including the restoration of natural resources and
services injured by an oil spill. OPA 90 also provides
criminal penalties for oil spills that result from crimi-
nal activity, gross negligence or willful misconduct on
the part of the spiller. Yet, this type of ‘‘emergency
legislation’’ is rarely revisited after its passage to in-
corporate new science, new technology, and the les-
sons learned from implementing the legislation. The
essays included in this special issue revisit OPA 90
3

from a variety of perspectives, including media poli-
tics, economics, environmental science, law, and public
policy implementation.
Media Coverage of Oil Spills
Global mass media outlets, particularly television,
play an increasingly important role in shaping public
perceptions of what counts as a crisis. It is easy to
document that the world provides us with a variety of
potential crises every day: famines, floods, wars, vol-
canic eruptions, insurrections and coup dÕetats, epi-
demics, aviation disasters, and terrorist attacks, to
name a few. The EVOS incident was by no means the
worst oil spill on record in terms of the volume of oil
spilled, economic impact, or long-term environmental
damage. Yet, the research by Birkland and Lawrence,
which opens this special issue, finds that EVOS be-
came an object of exceptional media attention in the
United States, mainly because it was set against an
Alaskan backdrop that most Americans consider their
last frontier wilderness. The before and after images
of Prince William Sound made it a ‘‘focusing event’’
for policy-makers, which resulted in passage of the
OPA 90.
However, the sensationalistic imagery that catalyzes
new legislation rarely captures the complex causes of
environmental accidents. While Exxon has often been
criticized for how it handled its media relations during
the EVOS, Alison G. Anderson finds that media
coverage of oil spills is largely driven by its own in-
ternal dynamic, including the vested interests of media
institutions and professionals. The media discourse on
oil spills is typically set up as a war of ‘‘talking
heads’’––spokesmen for environmental groups, repre-
sentatives from the oil and shipping industries, scien-
tists, government officials, and local citizen groups all
vie for the microphone with the knowledge that good
sound bytes––not good science––are what capture re-
portersÕ attention. The reporters themselves must tell a
‘‘good story’’, since they too are competing for time or
space in their own media outlet against other report-
ers. In playing out these structured roles, media
practitioners are rarely in a position to weigh or ex-
plain the competing ‘‘expert’’ viewpoints, since few
reporters have any scientific training in the field of
environmental science. The result is that all competing
points of view are presented as equally valid, when the
essence of science is that not all statements are equally
true.
Moreover, the heightened sense of emergency cre-
ated by a large oil spill, the intense glare of the media
spotlight, and the civil and legal liability issues com-
bine to create a network of adversarial relationships
that are rarely conducive to the development and
4 Spill Science & Technology Bulletin 7(1–2)
C.W. BARROW & B.J. ROTHSCHILD
implementation of best practices or good public pol-
icy. Inevitably, the initial information coming from a
spill site is incomplete and sometimes incorrect, but
once frightening images and ‘‘false information’’ are
broadcast globally they become part of the popular
culture and political environment that shapes public
policy decisions. Criminal and civil liability issues
can also affect the flow of information, which cre-
ates the appearance of secrecy or uncooperativeness
on the part of industry or government officials. Sci-
entists and professional technicians are often unac-
customed to such publicity and are poorly attuned to
the impact of their statements on public opinion,
where they become political commentators and not
just scientists.
Long-term Economic, Environmental,
and Cultural Impacts of Oil Spills
Indeed, such coverage and the images attached to it
may draw attention away from the results of long-
term scientific research, while failing to incorporate a
realistic assessment of the costs, the technical response
capabilities, and the legal liability issues created by
new legislation. All of the authors included in this
special issue of Spill Science & Technology Bulletin
agree that OPA 90 has been successful in the sense that
no comparable oil spill has occurred in US waters
since its passage and that OPA 90 has served as a
deterrent to oil spills generally. Kusum Ketkar ana-
lyzes US Coast Guard data to document significant
reductions in the number and quantity of oil spills in
US waters, but her costs-benefits analysis also finds
that the estimated costs of OPA 90Õs implementation
and enforcement exceed the estimated economic ben-
efits of the legislation.
Critics of costs-benefits analysis will argue that the
impact of oil spills is not wholly reducible to economic
values, since oil spills also affect the impacted envi-
ronment and may disrupt the culture of local (parti-
cularly aboriginal) inhabitants. Oil spills have an
economic impact and any evaluation of OPA 90
should incorporate this analysis, but it is true that oil
spills also have environmental and cultural impacts.
Yet, even on these points there is reason to doubt
many of the more sensationalistic claims that have
become commonly accepted ‘‘wisdom’’.
For instance, Paul F. Kingston suggests that to
analyze the long-term environmental impact of oil
spills, it is necessary to have a clear scientific definition
of what it means to ‘‘clean up’’ an oil spill. His review
of the pertinent literature suggests that oil contami-
nation can persist in the marine environment for many
years after an oil spill, but in most cases environmental
recovery is fairly swift and complete within 2–10 years.
BEYOND CRISIS SCIENCE & EMERGENCY LEGISLATION
It is often forgotten that ‘‘nature’’ must frequently
recover from enormous disasters, such as volcanic
eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, land slides, hur-
ricanes, and other storms. Consequently, many species
have evolved recovery mechanisms to cope with nat-
ural disasters.
Thus, in the context of an oil spill, Dr. Kingston
defines a ‘‘clean’’ environment ‘‘as the return to a level
of petroleum hydrocarbons that has no detectable
impact on the function of an ecosystem’’. In offering
this definition, he calls attention to the fact that there
is often a tendency in public debate to equate ‘‘clean’’
with ‘‘pristine’’, which demands levels of recovery and
purity that do not even occur under natural condi-
tions. Chris Wooley offers a similar insight, but from
the perspective of cultural anthropology. Wooley
challenges ‘‘the myth of the pristine environment’’ that
was deployed by the mass media during the Exxon
Valdez oil spill. He finds that contrary to the media
sound bytes and imagery, Prince William Sound and
the northern Gulf of Alaska have long been sites of
human activity by American and Russian fur traders,
commercial whalers and fishermen, miners, loggers,
fox farmers, and military construction crews. Wooley
argues that EVOS certainly had an important impact
on the areaÕs marine ecosystem, but it was not ‘‘as
many continue to claim, the mother of all environ-
mental impacts in the region’’.
Notwithstanding these findings, Rita Miraglia sug-
gests that policy-makers still need to be sensitive to the
cultural and behavioral impact of oil spills, which can
affect traditional ways of life and belief systems, as
well as residentsÕ trust in government and the scientific
community. The local residents affected by oil spills
often simply do not believe government officials or
scientists, particularly where individual perceptions or
anxieties come into conflict with official positions and
scientific findings.
Thomas Leschine observes that the news media and
environmental groups are frequently blamed for the
social amplification of risk that accompanies envi-
ronmental accidents, but he argues that oil spill sci-
ence is having mixed success in attenuating these risk
concerns. Leschine notes that closing the gap between
public perceptions of risk and the best oil spill science
will not be easy, precisely because it is ‘‘bound up in
questions of social trust’’. The scientist speaks a
different language and they descend on affected
communities like alien invaders after an oil spill.
Leschine suggests that closing the gap in social trust
between scientists, government officials, and citizens
requires a long-term strategy of new institution
building that brings diverse interests together in a
common forum to develop a shared vision of the risks
that should be addressed by scientists and government
agencies.
Spill Science & Technology Bulletin 7(1–2)
Public Policy and Oil Spills
Returning to the economic and financial risks of oil
transport, Dr. Chao Wu proposes an additional in-
stitutional change that involves a reallocation of fi-
nancial risk among those who benefit from the
carriage of oil. Dr. Wu examines the four Conventions
that establish an international system of compensation
for oil pollution from ships. She observes that the
current international system of insurance liability is
based on the principle that ‘‘polluters pay’’ for all
damages. However, she goes on to argue that the
carriage of oil is a service provided to society as a
whole with everyone benefiting from its carriage to
one degree or another. Consequently, Dr. Wu con-
tends that the citizens of those nations who bene-
fit from the carriage of oil should also bear a small
share of the risk of accidents. She proposes to insti-
tutionalize this new system of risk allocation at either
the regional or national level by creating a ‘‘fund
of last resort’’ that would compensate the costs of
oil spill pollution, clean up, and restoration in those
instances where compensation is not fully provided
by the current Conventions. This fund would be fi-
nanced through some form of indirect taxation
(e.g., an energy tax) imposed on the population as a
whole.
In the USA, OPA 90 assigns the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responsi-
bility for developing regulations for conducting na-
tional resource damage assessments following an oil
spill. Linda Burlington examines some case studies of
how these regulations have been implemented by
NOAA since 1996 and how they have changed the
way natural resource damage assessments are con-
ducted in the USA. Previously, these assessments fo-
cused exclusively on the monetary value of the lost
use of natural resources (economic value). The
new regulations incorporate ‘‘environmental values’’
which measure damages by the actual cost of restoring
the injured natural resources to their original condi-
tion.
Many people will see NOAAÕs new regulations
as one of the OPA 90 success stories. However, John
J. Gallagher focuses on the increasing tendency to
criminalize accidental oil spills. He finds that in re-
cent years the U.S. Department of Justice has begun
utilizing unrelated legislation to potentially apply
strict criminal liability to any oil spill regardless of
intent; thus, potentially criminalizing accidental oil
spills. Gallagher argues that the strict criminalization
of oil spills actually impedes the effectiveness of oil
spill response, which requires cooperation and co-
ordination by federal, state, and responsible-party
coordinators. The threat of criminal charges under-
mines the responsible partyÕs propensity to cooperate
5
 C.W. BARROW & B.J. ROTHSCHILD

and simultaneously obstructs the flow of information CLYDE W. BARROW

in the Unified Command Structure created by OPA Center for Policy Analysis
90. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Thus, looking to the future, Commander George 285 Old Westport Road
Burns of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) and North Dartmouth
others define an agenda for oil spill prevention, pre- MA 02747-2300, USA
paredeness, and best response in the 21st century. E-mail address: cbarrow@umassd.edu
Commander Burns informs us that with the imple-
mentation of OPA 90 now well underway, the USCG BRIAN J. ROTHSCHILD
is concerned about what the future may hold in terms School for Marine Science and Technology
of oil pollution threats. It is in the process of identi- University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
fying shortcomings in the response program, but at 285 Old Westport Road
this point there is still little political drive to system- North Dartmouth
atically reassess the overall impact and effectiveness of MA 02747-2300, USA
OPA 90. E-mail address: brothschild@umassd.edu

6 Spill Science & Technology Bulletin 7(1–2)