Last week, Kodiak Maritime Museum (KMM) presented Kodiak College with a collection of digitized videos of the public meetings held in Kodiak after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

An external hard drive holds a collection of archived materials from the summer of 1989. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Local photographer Alf Pryor migrated VHS tapes to a digital format, storing the data on two external hard drives. One hard drive is at Kodiak College and the other hard drive will become part of the Maritime Museum’s media collection.

The project was funded with a $9,000 grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The original VHS tapes that recorded events surrounding the oil spill were stored at Kodiak College library and it was feared the tapes may have reached their working lifetime, Toby Sullivan, executive director of the Kodiak Maritime Museum wrote in an e-mail.

The work between the Kodiak Maritime Museum and Kodiak College has saved these records from perishing.

“The collaboration between the college and Maritime Museum has resulted in the preservation of this valuable content,” Peggy Holm, head librarian at Kodiak College said. “At sone point, scholars and historians will be very interested.”

The archive contains video documenting dozens of public meetings held in Kodiak, including the “infamous daily briefings,” by Exxon representatives and government officials Sullivan said.

“Hundreds of hours of often contentious public meetings are on the tapes,” he said. “After one such meeting in May, 1989, during which Exxon resisted calls for an expanded oil cleanup effort on Kodiak Island, several hundred residents held a protest march through downtown Kodiak. Exxon instituted a large cleanup effort on Kodiak following the march.”

The project also includes the collection, digitization and exhibition of still images of the spill on Kodiak Island. Kodiak residents took the photos during the spill. Some of the images show fish sites, fishing boats, cleanup crews and villages around Kodiak Island.

These photos and selections from the new archive were unveiled at a commemorative forum held at Kodiak College in March. This photo exhibition was on display during Comfish and the Crab festival.

All of the video and photos are an important part of local history and evoke strong responses from community members, Holm said.

“From our local perspective this episode went on for days, weeks, months,” she said. “The town was traumatized. The public testimony was very impassioned; people were disturbed. For people who went through that period it’s very easy to stir up emotions about that tragedy.”

As of now. the digitized archive isn’t stored in any specific order.

“They have yet to be organized in a usable fashion,” Holm said. “It’s all uncut footage. A future project may be assembling it into a logical usable order that will inform everyone about that really tragic time period.”

Barbara Bolson, director at Kodiak College, was presented with the digitized archive and is pleased to be involved with a “wonderful, rich resource for the community.”

“It’s a very rich source of material now and into the future,” Bolson said. “We’ve had several important donations in the past few years. We’re very pleased with that. We’re excited that it’s going to make these documents available in the future.”

Approximately 11 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude oil spilled into the sea on March 24, 1989, in Prince William Sound when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez grounded on Bligh Reef.

The oil coated beaches as far away as Kodiak and Chignik on the Alaska Peninsula.

“Except for a small gillnet salmon fishery, the Kodiak salmon season was closed for the entire 1989 season,” Sullivan said.

The aftermath of the incident prompted a class action lawsuit involving 40,000 fishermen, processing workers and Alaska Natives resulting in a $5 billion punitive damage judgment against Exxon in 1994. After years of appeals, Exxon prevailed in a June, 2008 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which lowered the damage award to $509 million.

Mirror writer Louis Garcia can be reached via e-mail at lgarcia@kodiakdailymirror.com.