Fifty years ago, on June 23, 1976, the NEPCO oil tanker ran aground, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the St. Lawrence River.
The so-called “Slick of ‘76” has become a thing of folklore and a warning of environmental devastation in the Thousand Islands and beyond. It even spawned a musical.
North Country native Emma French wanted to preserve the oral history of that time. So she made a short documentary featuring the residents, the muckers, and the responders to the disaster.
David Sommerstein50 years later, an oral history of the St. Lawrence River ‘Slick of ’76’
French told David Sommerstein it was a foggy, humid night when the tanker hit a shoal off Wellesley Island. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
EMMA FRENCH: There was a large bang. Somebody who actually talked to the captain of that ship, the captain said, ‘oh yeah, we heard a large thunder, and then we kept going.’ So, they kept going upriver after they had initially broken the hull. They went into Brown’s Bay where they were supposed to stay, but they hit ground again, didn’t think anything of it, and then they kept going upriver. So, at 1:30 in the morning on June 23rd, there were 300,000 gallons of oil leaking from this barge into the St. Lawrence River, and they just continued upriver.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN: One of the things that I learned from your video was this, that they didn’t even realize they were leaking this oil, and they were just going all up the river leaking oil the whole way.
FRENCH: Yeah, it’s crazy to think that you heard a bang in your ship and you didn’t think anything of it. I don’t know what the captain was thinking. I don’t know what the crew was thinking. But pretty quickly after the first couple of hits, people could smell it.
SOMMERSTEIN: And so people woke up the next morning to hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil washing up on the shores of the beautiful Thousand Islands, the beautiful St. Lawrence River.
FRENCH: Yeah, the thing that people consistently told me about was the smell, that people woke up and they could smell it. And the oil wasn’t all the way downriver all at once. It took days for it to go from Wellesley Island to Alexandria Bay to eventually Chippewa Bay. And if you think about the nature of those bays, it sucks everything in.
SOMMERSTEIN: So they recruited and paid people to clean the shoreline by hand, rock by rock, duck by duck. I’m sure you talked to some of those people.
FRENCH: Yeah, and it was not easy work. They had limited equipment. They had wet suits, big, heavy suits, and it was hot, and it was summertime. They were going rock by rock, and they had absorbent pads, and they had things that looked like pom-poms that they were just using to soak up as much oil as possible. Alix White told me that they were chopping down the wetlands and the reeds because you can’t get oil out of the reeds. And one of the most devastating things was that people saw the effect on the wildlife. The fish were dying. The birds were dying. And this is June. That’s one of the most important times for the river because things are reproducing.
SOMMERSTEIN: Tell us about an interview, something that surprised you, a conversation that you had with somebody.
FRENCH: Alix White was one of my favorite interviews. She was the second woman hired to be a mucker, which was a big deal. Don Price, who ran Sealand Restoration [which was in charge of the response], wasn’t hiring women at first. I’m going to bring it back to the wildlife because we talk about the birds and the fish, but blue herons are a particularly iconic species of the St. Lawrence River. She described how one day somebody brought in a blue heron covered in oil.
“And I was just holding it and watching the weight of the oil pull the feathers off the spine,” White told French. A fellow mucker took the heron and killed it, “because that bird was not going to survive,” White said.
When she was telling me that and describing that to me, you could tell that it was something that was deeply moving to her. I hesitate to use the word traumatic, but there’s got to be some desensitization when you’re doing that day in and day out. I think she did a wonderful job explaining it to me.
SOMMERSTEIN: What was it like for you to talk with all these people who had first-hand knowledge, you who had only heard of this from your grandparents, from your parents, as a younger generation person.
FRENCH: As a person who likes to document everything, I just wanted to get as much information as possible, anyway that I could. I went to school for film, so that was the best way that I knew how to document everything.
I just wanted the people I interviewed to talk and talk and talk. Obviously, I feel a very, very personal connection to this area and to the river. And so, at some point, it just felt like two people who love the river talking about the river. It didn’t feel like younger generation, older generation thing. It just felt like we got this shared love. You had an experience. What was that experience?