The Big Miracle!

Big Miracle- the book tells the true story of three gray whales trapped beneath Arctic ice in the fall of 1988, and of Operation Breakthrough, the collaborative efforts to free them by oil company executives, activists, Inupiat people, the U.S. military, and Soviet ice-breakers.


Big Miracle -the movie-is a 2012 British-American family drama film starring Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski. The film, directed by Ken Kwapis, is based on the 1989 book Freeing the Whales by Tom Rose, which covers Operation Breakthrough, the 1988 international effort to rescue gray whales trapped in ice near Point Barrow, Alaska.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Breakthrough

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Miracle







 http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/moviemom/2012/02/the-real-story-big-miracle-and-the-alaskan-whale-rescue.html


“[W]e came to tell the world about a common occurrence,” he wrote “the routine stranding of three whales under a patch of ice. The only thing that made this stranding extraordinary was that it happened just 20 miles from a satellite uplink earth station. Had the facility been located far away, these whales, like dozen of others each year, would have died ordinary deaths.”

 The movie shows how all of the participants in the rescue used or tried to use the media for their own purposes, including Greenpeace, which had to bring in more people to answer phones as calls came in from all over the world and the oil man portrayed in the film by Ted Danson. Rose writes: Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/moviemom/2012/02/the-real-story-big-miracle-and-the-alaskan-whale-rescue.html#K1aZqHuM7VFRw3q0.99

The $500,000 ARCO spent on Operation Breakout was one of the best investments it ever made. A $20 million public relations campaign couldn’t have bought a tenth the goodwill ARCO earned helping free the three trapped whales. It seemed to be perfect timing. ARCO cashed in at a critical juncture in the history of the slumping Alaskan oil industry. No oil company in Alaska ever received more favorable press coverage than ARCO did during its two week investment in Operation Breakout. Usually the rich whipping boy of the environmentalists, ARCO now worked side by side with Cindy Lowry and Greenpeace. In the game of P.R. Pac-Man, ARCO swallowed any hint of criticism by pouring tremendous resources into a rescue destined to save three animals endangered by nature, not man’s insatiable carving for fossil fuels.

Of course, ARCO’s work on behalf of the three whales stranded in Barrow did nothing to clean up its share of the more than 11,000 acres of North Slope Arctic tundra the Environmental Protection Agency said were ruined by oil drilling.

Read more at http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/moviemom/2012/02/the-real-story-big-miracle-and-the-alaskan-whale-rescue.html#K1aZqHuM7VFRw3q0.99