‘Fool’s errand’: Why the Exxon Valdez looms large over northern pipeline debate

VICTORIA — The Exxon Valdez disaster happened more than 36 years ago off Alaska’s coast, but the catastrophic oil spill still looms over plans for a pipeline from Alberta to the northern British Columbia coast.

Rick Steiner, a former academic who was one of the first on the scene of the infamous disaster and has closely studied its aftermath, said the risk of a repeat along the B.C. coast remained, despite improvements and assurances from industry to the contrary.

Both the Exxon Valdez and the more recent 2016 diesel spill from the sinking of the Nathan E. Stewart tugboat off B.C.’s central coast have been invoked by First Nations and environmental groups opposed to the prospect of easing a ban on tanker traffic, to service a potential northern pipeline. So too has this month’s grounding of a container barge near Bella Bella.

But it is the consequences of the Exxon Valdez spill that Steiner said produced the kind of “hard lessons” that he said should be informing policy-makers — including that spills are not definitively preventable.

“You don’t drive the risk of this thing to zero,” he said.

Around midnight on March 24, 1989, the 300-metre-long supertanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound just off the Alaskan coast.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated 260,000 barrels of crude spilled into the sound; other groups estimated up to 760,000 barrels.

Haunting images of seabirds coated in oil, the black slick lapping the once-pristine shores, have become visual shorthand for the consequences of a major spill.

Steiner, now an environmental consultant, said the damage had become, to some extent, permanent.

“There will never be full ecological recovery in Prince William Sound from this,” he said.

Steiner saw the Exxon Valdez disaster as a cautionary tale for the Canadian government, and he warned against building a pipeline from Alberta to the northern coast and creating exceptions to the 53-year-old moratorium on tanker traffic on the B.C. north coast, which was formalized in legislation in 2019.

Alberta and the federal government signed a memorandum of understanding for a northern pipeline on Thursday. Coastal First Nations swiftly declared it “would never happen,” and said the tanker ban was non-negotiable.

Steiner, who taught at the University of Alaska at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill and helped lead the local response, said B.C.’s northern coast already faced the prospect of a “catastrophic oil spill” from American tankers moving past Haida Gwaii.

A pipeline terminal in northern B.C. with tankers shipping bitumen to distant markets in Asia would only add to that risk, and the Canadian government needed to ask itself whether “obliterating the socio-economic lives of people along the north coast of B.C. and southeast Alaska” would be worth the risk, he said.

“The answer from my standpoint, would be to strongly advise the Canadian government against this,” he said. “This would be a fool’s errand.”

Some industry groups, including the Chamber of Shipping, oppose the ban.

In 2017, it said in a submission to a Parliament committee that the tanker ban legislation was not supported by “tangible evidence” and that tanker safety had been improved by “new regulations, more robust ship design codes, enhanced emergency preparedness and response systems, and better self-regulation and procedures.”

“Bill C-48 establishes a precedent in Canada for managing our national supply chain and is another layer of complexity on the already multi-faceted supply chain, thereby making Canada a more complex country in which to operate,” it said.

Steiner acknowledged that the Exxon Valdez disaster and its aftermath led to several changes.

“Yes, we have double-hulled tankers now,” he says. “We have tug escorts. We have better vessel tracking systems. We have piloting requirements and things like that.”

But he said those changes do not preclude another catastrophe.

“It’s spectacularly dangerous to conceive of putting a pipeline to northern B.C. and hauling that oil across the Gulf of Alaska to Asian markets,” he said. “It should not see the light of day.”

Steiner said the tanker ban on the north coast is the “safest thing” for “existing sustainable economies” in British Columbia.

This perspective echoed concerns of First Nations along the northern and central coast, such as the Heiltsuk Nation, which said in a statement last week that it was still recovering from the sinking of the Nathan E. Stewart nine years ago, which released about 110,000 litres of diesel oil.

“Our cultural and harvesting areas have remained closed since then,” it said.

“That was a spill under 700 barrels in size and polluted over 1,500 acres of our territory. In contrast, supertankers can carry (two) million barrels of oil. We cannot imagine and will never allow that kind of risk in our territory.”

Steiner, who has worked with Coastal First Nations, said any spill of 1,000 barrels was considered catastrophic in his line of work.

He believed there would be revived attention for the Exxon Valdez disaster as talk of a northern pipeline continued.

“Exxon Valdez does tend to get raised in any debate about transporting crude oil around the world … and rightfully so,” Steiner said.

David Tindall, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, said the disaster worked its way into North American culture because it “was very visual.”

“So, there was an awful lot of imagery on TV and in documentaries, in newspapers and in magazines, and so on,” he said. “It was a really powerful thing at the time.”

Tindall said the spill also shaped the debate about since-abandoned plans for the Northern Gateway pipeline and the eventual expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline in B.C.

Tindall said familiarity with the Exxon Valdez had a generational component, and he was “not sure the average 25-year-old has Exxon Valdez on their mind.”

But the images of the spill had become familiar, he said. “When people see birds that are covered in oil, or they see rescue workers trying to clean up birds or seals, or other kinds of animals that live along the coast, that is a very big impact,” he said.

Such images would likely have a much bigger impact on the debate than technical details about how much more greenhouse gas emissions might be produced, he says.

First Nations title and treaty rights would also shape the debate, and Tindall said he expected various groups opposed to the project to use whatever tools were available to them.

“So, if they think that imagery and a PR campaign about the downsides of possible oil spills is going to work, then they will try that,” he said.

“If that doesn’t seem to be working, then maybe, they pivot to court cases and kind of push on Indigenous rights. If that doesn’t work, maybe they will try some other kind of angle, something to do with the financial consequences of the project.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 30, 2025.

Wolfgang Depner, The Canadian Press