Unemployed commercial fishermen and their families wait in line to receive handouts from New Orleans Catholic Charities in Hopedale, Louisiana. Many local fishermen have been temporarily shut down after the BP spill. Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images

In 1989, five months after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, sociologist J. Steven Picou arrived in the fishing village of Cordova, Alaska (population 2,450), to document the human toll that resulted from 11 million gallons of oil poisoning the ecosystem.

Picou and his colleagues were underfunded and unprepared, wearing cheap plastic ponchos that were no match for the region's torrential rains and subsisting on canned wieners and beans. But their studies of the community in the aftermath of the oil spill revealed lives shattered and a town torn apart by social and psychological damage that lasted for two decades.  

Today Picou is a professor at the University of South Alabama and one of the world's leading experts on the social ramifications of oil spills -- something his neighbors in Orange Beach, Alabama, could soon come to experience for themselves. He lives 300 yards from the Gulf of Mexico, potentially in the path of oil gushing from the sea floor following last month's explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform.

As he and his home prepare for the possibility of a disaster rivaling the one he studied in Cordova, what Picou learned in Alaska gives his neighbors fair reason to worry, but it could also provide them with tools to cope and perhaps avoid some of the worst of what could soon befall them.

A Town Torn Apart

After the Alaska spill, Picou's psychological surveys detailed sleepless nights, unfocused anger, misplaced emotions, unwanted thoughts, lost friendships, and soured family relationships among the people of Cordova. Those feelings lasted for years; many people never did heal. Residents  say that divorces and suicides resulted from the spill.

Four years after the disaster, a former mayor took his life, leaving a note blaming the act partly on his inability to help the community recover economically and emotionally from the crisis.

Picou's surveys found numerical indicators of stress levels that matched what researchers would expect to see after a personal crisis such as rape or the loss of a child -- although he takes pains not to equate those events with the spill. The stress turned the town into a "corrosive community," in Picou's phrase, as local politics and social relationships degenerated into demonization and feuding.

Last week, Picou heard from one of his old friends in Cordova -- a fisherman who had seen pictures on TV of an oil-slicked bird, stricken by the BP spill. The man couldn't stand to watch it. He felt nauseous, he told Picou, and had to turn the TV off.

Relying on the Environment

The spill zone in the Gulf is more heavily populated and accessible than Alaska's shores, but many of the fishing communities, especially in Louisiana, bear a striking similarity to coastal towns and villages in Alaska. They're small, insular, culturally distinct, and 100 percent dependent on a clean marine environment, with local economies that rely entirely on fishing. Picou believes that communities with a more direct relationship to their environment are especially vulnerable to the psychological harm he saw in Cordova.

"Even though the players are different and it's three or four thousand miles away, the social and community consequences look very much the same to me," Picou says.

Before the Exxon Valdez spill, Cordova's social and economic heart would beat with the return of the herring and salmon, which brought work, money, and a sense of purpose to the entire community. The decline of those fisheries -- in the case of herring, a total loss -- ruined the fortunes of fishermen whose sense of personal identity hinged on their ability to support their families in a good, middle-class lifestyle from the waters of the Sound.

The early response to the Gulf spill by industry and the government bears a disturbing similarity to that of the Alaska disaster. Their initial containment efforts were ineffective, and their reassuring early statements later proved false as the disaster became much worse than originally described.

Picou has advised locals in the Gulf to defend their own waters, homes, and livelihoods, avoiding the sense of helplessness and forced dependency on Exxon that affected Alaskan fishermen after their spill. Trying is important, even though history shows that once a large quantity of oil is released in the water, the economic and environmental damage it causes cannot be stopped.

Reaching Out to the Gulf

The differences between the Exxon and BP disasters are significant, too. The Gulf spill's lighter oil, slower release rate, and greater distance from shore all help.

Unlike Exxon, which was widely criticized for its slow response and lack of community outreach, BP seems to be learning from its early errors. For example, the company is providing block grants to state agencies, which are directing the funds to local protection efforts. As a result, there are more hands on deck to protect important natural resources, as thousands of people deploy floating booms across coastal estuaries. That was never possible on Alaska's inaccessible shores, where transportation was more difficult and the floating oil arrived in a matter of days.

After the Exxon Valdez, the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council created an award-winning handbook for use by other communities coping with similar technological and environmental disasters. Advice ranges from how a local government can set up an incident command structure, to stay in control of information, finances and operations, to creating a peer counseling program so that neighbors can support one another. The handbook is now posted on the council's website, where Gulf communities can access it.

Veterans of the Alaska spill, including activists who know what information to request from oil companies and spill experts who can help organize clean-up efforts, are already working with environmental organizations and agencies in the Gulf region.

Best Advice: Stick Together

For Picou's part, the sociologist finds himself offering advice to his neighbors and speaking to local media outlets, sharing bits of wisdom that may help them avoid some of the social and psychological pain that tore apart the people he came to count as friends in Cordova. Above all else, Picou says, "I'm trying to encourage them to stick together."

But his experience also makes him realistic. The oil's damage will not be entirely stopped, nor will the damage to people and their relationships. As was the case with Alaska's fishermen, those who rely on the Gulf's fish for their livelihood have already begun to feel betrayed by the government and BP. In particular, Picou notes, fishermen on the Gulf Coast believed their friends in the oil industry who said that drilling was safe and that spills would not threaten their fishing grounds.

Now, as he nears retirement age, Picou is working to train younger researchers to do what he did in Cordova for 20 years, taking his carefully crafted surveys to communities throughout the Gulf. What he learned in Alaska, he hopes, can help his neighbors in Alabama, and what his protégés learn this time might help the victims of the next disaster, whenever and wherever it comes.

Alaska-based writer Charles Wohlforth covered the Exxon Valdez spill and its long-term impacts on the community and environment. His new book, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, will be published June 8.