| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis. By Thomas D. Beamish. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 232 pp. Illustrations. Paper $21.95.

Thomas D. Beamish's fine sociological study suggests we do not pay adequate attention to oil spills, a conclusion that may surprise readers of this journal. When a drunken Joseph Hazelwood slammed the Exxon Valdez oil tanker into Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska, the resulting spill was calamitous. Images of birds and seals blackened by oil immediately dominated the news, prompting public outrage, an immediate cleanup effort and Congress's passage of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Today the spill is recognized as one of the worst events in American environmental history. 1

How did an oil spill perhaps twice the size of the Exxon Valdez spill go undetected for over three decades? That is the question Beamish addresses in his study of Unocal's spill in California's Guadalupe Dunes. The Unocal spill was the single largest reported oil spill in United States history, with as much as 20 million gallons spilling into the sand. Unlike the Valdez spill, this disaster was slow to develop, occurring gradually over thirty-eight years. This disaster is far less famous than its Alaskan counterpart; Beamish calculated that the national press devoted nine stories to the Guadalupe Dunes spill and over five hundred to the Exxon Valdez spill between 1990 and 1996. . . .

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