Richard A. Fineberg, Relentless Skeptic of Alaska Pipeline, Dies at 83

When Richard A. Fineberg lived in a small cabin in central Alaska, overlooking a valley near Fairbanks, it was packed with documents.

Piled floor to ceiling, they were the product of years of scrutinizing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System — its construction, finances and safety — and probing other environmental and public interest issues. Still more papers were stashed under the cabin, outside in an Airstream trailer and in a storage unit.

Mr. Fineberg accumulated this hoard over five decades of dogged research, first as a political science professor and then as an investigative journalist and magnet for whistle blowers, a policy analyst for two governors, and an independent researcher.

“His articles during the building of the pipeline were a major factor in the safety of the line today,” Steve Cowper, a former governor of Alaska, told The Associated Press in 1995.

Another admirer, Larry Persily, a former deputy commissioner of revenue for the state, told Far North Oil & Gas magazine in 2006, “I don’t take everything he says as the gospel, as his supporters do, nor do I believe he’s the Antichrist, as his critics do.” But, he added, “I think Alaska benefits from having people like Richard Fineberg.”

Mr. Fineberg spent nearly 20 years writing reports and lobbying state officials to revise the financial deal that Alaska made in the 1980s on the fees that the pipeline’s owner, Alyeska, a consortium of oil companies, could charge shippers to move oil through the pipeline.

His scholarship bolstered a 2002 ruling by the state’s energy regulator that reduced those fees to a reasonable level, putting more of the money in the state’s coffers, said Philip Wight, a professor of history at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who uses documents from Mr. Fineberg’s archive in his classes.

“Richard kept saying, ‘We’re getting screwed,’” said Mr. Wight, who bought Mr. Fineberg’s cabin in 2020. “He never shut up about it. The upshot is that he helped deliver billions of dollars to the state.”

Mr. Fineberg died on Sept. 27 at an assisted living facility in Fairbanks. He was 83. His daughter and only immediate survivor, Renata Fineberg, confirmed his death but said she did not know the cause.

Mr. Fineberg never married and lived ascetically on about $10,000 a year, often wearing threadbare clothing and doing without indoor plumbing. He was serious about his work, but he wasn’t focused on oil spills and finances all the time.

He played bluegrass and folk music on the banjo, performing in the Seattle airport during stopovers on flights to and from the lower 48 states. In his younger days he liked to hop freight trains and ride in boxcars.

He was also close to his daughter, whom he first met when she was 13.

“He loved being on the road,” Ms. Fineberg said. “It was soothing to him. We took road trips, and whenever a train came by, we’d stop and he’d talk about them and their routes.”

Mr. Fineberg embarked on a different sort of adventure in 1971, when he boarded a Canadian fishing boat, the Greenpeace, as it set out from Vancouver, British Columbia, for the Aleutian archipelago in Alaska, in an attempt to stop a five-megaton nuclear bomb from being detonated beneath the volcanic island of Amchitka.

The test, as he saw it, was a bellicose act by the United States.

“You couldn’t come up with a closer place to the Soviet Union to be testing if you tried,” he recalled in an interview in 2009 with The Province, a Vancouver newspaper. “To me it felt warlike.”

Some Greenpeace crew members assumed Mr. Fineberg was with the C.I.A. But in 2006, Ben Metcalfe, one of the crew, told The Vancouver Sun, “He was just a weird academic who didn’t fit in.”

The ship was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, and the explosion — 250 times more powerful than the one in Hiroshima — proceeded. But the mission received worldwide attention, spawning the Greenpeace environmental organization. And in late 1972, the Atomic Energy Commission (now the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) began dismantling the test site.

Richard Arthur Fineberg was born on Sept. 9, 1941, in St. Louis. His father, Maxwell, was an ear, nose and throat doctor. His mother, Jeanne (Marx) Fineberg, was the public information coordinator for the St. Louis County Highway Department.

Mr. Fineberg graduated from Beloit College, in Wisconsin, in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in government. In 1968, he marched with striking grape workers in California, the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Claremont Graduate School (now University). He received his Ph.D. in 1970.

By then, he was teaching political science at the University of Alaska Juneau (now the University of Alaska Southeast) and starting his freelance reporting career.

In 1970, he wrote five articles for The Anchorage Daily News, revealing that in 1966 the Army had placed 200 canisters of deadly nerve gas on a frozen lake in Fort Greely, Alaska, letting them sink to the bottom when the ice thawed and losing track of them for three years.

That investigation — which also found that the Army was conducting nerve-gas testing at Ft. Greely, despite its denials — did not get much attention until January 1971, when a front-page article in The Washington Post reported what Mr. Fineberg had found. Instead of crediting him, though, it cited as its main source a “mimeographed Army statement” slipped under Capitol Hill doors, along with the Army’s answers to questions raised by Mike Gravel, a Senator from Alaska.

But A. Robert Smith, the Washington correspondent for The Portland Oregonian, took note of Mr. Fineberg’s articles. “Faced with Prof. Fineberg’s disclosure,” Mr. Smith wrote, “the Army admitted the bizarre episode and hastened to assure Congress” that it had detoxified the canisters.

Following his Greenpeace adventure, Mr. Fineberg left teaching to freelance for Alaskan newspapers. He reported on the pipeline, covering its politics and spills, equipment problems, oil tanker regulations and falsified X-rays of pipeline welds. In 1975, Alyeska, the consortium of oil companies that owned the pipeline, accused him of showing bias in an article he wrote about a fuel-oil spill at Galbraith Lake, in northern Alaska.

During the 1980s, Mr. Fineberg spent six years with Alaska’s Office of Management and Budget as a policy analyst under former Gov. Bill Sheffield and Mr. Cowper, whom he also served as an oil and gas adviser. He left after a dispute with Mr. Cowper and spent the rest of his career writing reports commissioned by clients around the world on various subjects, including the necessity of upgrading and maintaining the Alaskan pipeline.

In 2006, 13 days after more than 200,000 gallons of crude oil leaked out of a corroded transmission line operated by the oil company BP near the beginning of the pipeline — onto the North Slope in the Prudhoe Bay production area — Mr. Fineberg issued a scathing report concerning the oil company BP, one of the pipeline’s owners. BP’s systems, it turned out, had not detected the spill; it was a worker who smelled hydrocarbons who sounded the alarm.

“Over the last decade, BP has consistently argued for less stringent leak detection requirements,” Mr. Fineberg wrote in his report for the nonprofit Alaska Forum for Environmental Responsibility, “while delaying installation of a state-of-the-art system that might have alerted field operators to the problem before the spill turned into the largest in North Slope history.”

Ms. Fineberg said her father was driven to hold oil companies “accountable to their promises for environmental protections.”

She added: “Some people say his idea of a good time was to dig into a number problem for six weeks. He couldn’t stop.”