The Deadliest Catch!

[excel]

18 years after Valdez spill, a fisherman's fight goes on
By MIKE LEWIS
P-I REPORTER

Michael McLenaghan understands how easy it can be to have a life defined by a single event. He doesn't want to be that guy, the one for whom every conversation marches to the same place, the one people back away from at a party or at lunch when they see a familiar head of steam building -- again.


"I try not to let myself be defined by that disaster," the 51-year-old ex-Seattle skipper said by cell phone from Washington, D.C. "I don't want to be known as 'the angry man.' "

Yet he can't always help it. It's that anger that spurred him to buy a plane ticket and fly 3,000 miles across the country and walk into the U.S. Supreme Court to witness the latest installment in a nearly two-decade serial known as the Exxon Valdez civil court case, or more specifically, Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker.

And it's that anger that even after 18 years can swing from simmer to boil when he rehashes what he had, what he lost and what he's learned in the years since a tanker ran aground on Bligh Reef near Prince William Sound and simultaneously unleashed the nation's largest oil spill and longest-running civil case.

McLenaghan's story, in brief: "I grew up in Ballard and went to Ballard High. A lot of my friends were fishermen and they seemed to do pretty well. I looked into going into the service, but it didn't pay. I grew up in a blue-collar family and I didn't really have any aspirations of going to college -- something I changed with the next generation.

"I advertised my services at Fishermen's Terminal. At first, fishing was something to do in the summer. But then I found I was pretty good at it."

So McLenaghan worked his way up the ranks. In two years, he was running his own gillnetter. At 24, he skippered a salmon and herring purse seiner. In 1989, he'd made enough money to go all in: $1 million in savings and loans -- everything he had -- to buy a 50-foot boat and licenses for Prince William Sound herring, Cook Inlet herring and Chignik salmon.

Two months later, at 11 p.m. on March 23, 1989, Capt. Joseph Hazelwood retired to his stateroom and left third-mate Gregory Cousins in charge of the tanker Exxon Valdez as it sailed toward Washington.

McLenaghan hadn't yet fished a single day on his new licenses or boat. "I had just dumped all of my money into it. You know how it goes, how you buy a business and that first year is pivotal.

"Once the oil spill hit, it zeroed me out."

So McLenaghan started selling stuff. So did every other fisherman, from Seattle to Alaska, who depended on the closed fisheries. And it was not, to put it plainly, a seller's market.

His daughter was 3 at the time. Today, thanks to good grades and healthy loans, she's a junior at Stanford.

Eventually, with more loans, McLenaghan mostly dug himself out from under the Valdez disaster. In 2000, he moved his family from Seattle and began working the squid fisheries off Santa Barbara. In the time since the spill and the first 1994 jury award for $5 billion, he had another daughter. She's a junior in a California high school.

Exxon, for its part, also appears to have recovered. In recent years, the company has set records as the most profitable in world history, netting nearly $40 billion in 2006 alone.

And now McLenaghan finds himself in Washington, D.C., still fighting for the money he and several juries believe the oil giant owes to thousands of fishermen who put their life savings into businesses built on what were once some of the world's richest fisheries.

During Wednesday's oral arguments, which if legal experts are to be believed could mark the end of the litigation, McLenaghan said it appeared as if the high court remained skeptical of Exxon's myriad claims -- from not having legal responsibility for Hazelwood's stewardship to already having paid plenty for cleanup and compensation.

But then again, it's hard to say what the justices are thinking. He does know this: When he thinks about the money he lost, about the fishermen the spill broke, it's hard not to be angry. He feels the company should pay for the business he lost, his $1 million.

"What they are going to pay me is not going to make me happy," he said after the arguments concluded. "The $2.5 billion plus interest (the jury award under appeal) -- is it enough to make us whole? No way.

"But is it enough to make me shut up and stop being the angry man? Yes, I guess it is."