In the union hall, Lamb stands glowering at a wall chart of Prince William Sound, Grimes and Guard beside him.

"Anything new?" asks Steiner.

"You tell us," says Lamb.

"I hear there's nobody out there. Nobody's cleaning it up." "That's what we hear," says Grimes.

Lamb rattles a sheaf of papers—the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company's oil spill emergency contingency plan, required by the state of Alaska. "They say they can contain any spill within 50 miles in 12 hours. This one's only half that far."

Guard gives the chart a hard poke at Bligh Reef, then sweeps his hand along a path of seaward currents, past the dozens of islands, the hundreds of bays and fjords between the reef and the open sea of the Gulf of Alaska. "If no one cleans it up, man, we're done for."

For an hour they talk possibilities. In terms of both commercial fisheries and salmonid biology, this is precisely the worst time of year for an oil spill. Tens of millions of herring—a $12 million annual fishery—will be schooling into the sound next week to spawn in shallow water. In addition, early April is when hundreds of millions of salmon fry migrate from spawning streams into saltwater estuaries, where they feed for three or four months before moving out to sea. Steiner lists the ways that oil can kill them: ingestion of oiled prey, intake of petroleum compounds through the gills, disruption of homing instincts. The fishermen understand. The salmon fry are their seedlings, the stock for a $120 million annual harvest.

"It's not only our livelihood," says Grimes. "It's our home. It's our life."

Steiner nods. "I'm going to have to go take a look," he says, and abruptly heads out the door and down to Gary Graham's Cessna 206 floatplane.

At 10 a.m., 45 miles to the northwest, the Cessna banks around Bligh Island toward Valdez Narrows, and suddenly the sea, for at least three or four miles to the north, is a black-and-purplish bruise. Just below, like bubbles coming up, five sea lions bob and dive, bob and dive, sending iridescent pink swirls through the oil.

At the apex of the spill sits the Exxon Valdez, listing. There is a tug beside her, and another tanker, the Baton Rouge,lies a quarter of a mile off, blowing huge white plumes of water as she deballasts her holds to make room for the millions of gallons of oil that remain in her stricken sister. Nine hours into it, there is no oil spill containment equipment­—no barges, no skimmers, no oil-absorbent booms, no suction pumps. And—Steiner searches up through the narrows toward the port of Valdez—no such equipment is on the way.