As this year’s summer faded, Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly swath along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Television provided unrelenting coverage. For hours at a time, it seemed as if nearly everything else in the world was no longer newsworthy. Human suffering and human depravity were in all our living rooms, not as abstractions but palpable. As New Orleans descended into chaos and even, in places, anarchy, we were spared the worst of the pictures. Through a combination of censorship and the restraints of taste, the misery in the Superdome and the convention center came largely through word pictures rather than visual images.
We are still too close in time to the tragedy to know all of its ramifications. Historians will eventually sort out what went wrong in responding to the wrath of nature, but it’s already apparent that a more timely response would have saved lives. Even as desperate people waited to be rescued, finger-pointing and bureaucratic delay compounded the problem. Fortunately, the Coast Guard did respond quickly, because it is tailor-made for such a dire situation. The Coast Guard saves lives and handles the paperwork later. Thus it was not at all surprising that when Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was taken off the job of overseeing the crisis, his replacement was Vice Admiral Thad Allen, a Coast Guardsman.
The recent situation brings to mind an earlier disaster, this one man-made, in which the Coast Guard was called to the rescue. As the result of the grounding of the tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in March 1989, millions of gallons of crude oil polluted the water and then moved ashore. The commandant of the Coast Guard at the time was Admiral Paul Yost, and his Naval Institute oral history provides a candid account of his service’s response.
Then, as now, politics soon came to the fore. Alaska Senator Ted Stevens made it clear that the federal government had to step in and deal with the environmental mess that errant ship handling had created. President George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, John Sununu, said to the Coast Guard commandant, “You are going to Alaska, and you are going to oversee this oil-spill cleanup.”
In his characteristic, quick-draw fashion, Yost replied: “Mr. Sununu, I’m not going to Alaska. I’m running the U.S. Coast Guard, which is a worldwide operation, and I can’t run it from some little town like Valdez.” Before he could say anything more, Yost felt a hand on his shoulder. It was his boss, Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner, who said very quietly, “Paul, you’re going to Alaska.” And go he did.
He was soon in a Valdez auditorium full of people looking for both help and answers. Yost made it clear that he was taking charge and sensed that the Alaskans were relieved. Someone from outside was going to confront their problem. As in the New Orleans situation, a Coast Guard vice admiral, Clyde Robbins, became the on-scene commander. Yost headed back to Washington and his worldwide job, but made periodic trips back to Alaska to assess the situation and provide course corrections as necessary.
In the case of the oil spill, the cause of the calamity was not a faceless Mother Nature; the Exxon Corporation could and did expend a great many dollars and man-hours to effect the cleanup. The commandant’s relationship was initially facilitated by his personal relationship with Frank Iarossi, a former Coast Guard officer who was then president of Exxon Shipping. The two knew each other from the Coast Guard Academy and worked well together. But then one of Exxon’s oilfield men replaced Iarossi in the cleanup operation, and friction developed between him and Yost. Yost soon heard from Exxon’s president, William Stevens, who asked, “Paul, how do you like my new man?”
The Coast Guardsman replied: “The guy you had before was super. He knew what he was doing, and he and I got along fine, and we talked the same language. This new guy is hard to get along with.”
As Yost recalled with a laugh, Steven’s response was “Paul, you told me exactly the right thing, exactly what I wanted. Thank you.” In Exxon’s view, government and industry shouldn’t be too cozy. The work did go on, not always to Yost’s liking, but he acknowledged afterward that the corporation expended enormous effort in cleaning the befouled water and shore.
In addition to the professional responsibility he felt for managing the cleanup, Admiral Yost saw the impact of the mishap on a personal level as well through his encounters with hundreds of Alaskans whose lives had been thrown into disarray. Their reactions brought home to him what the television pictures from the Gulf have done for us—put a disaster in human terms.
When people asked him what they could do to help, he said: “Start to clean. I don’t care how you do it, start to clean.” One day Yost went out on an oil-blackened beach and saw people wiping up the mess with rags, not high tech, but, as he said, a start. Among the group he encountered, more than 20 miles away from any kind of support facilities, was a native woman, probably a Tlingit Indian. She was in her 40s, covered with oil, her hair awry. The day was cold, rainy, and windy. She was working as hard as she could, and Admiral Yost said to her, “Ma’am, what are you doing out on this beach?” She replied: “Admiral, this is my country. This is my country.”