.../...The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion. It's so cheap, it's like a permit to spill.
Exxon knew this would happen. Right after the spill, I was brought to Alaska by the Natives whose Prince William Sound islands, livelihoods, and their food source was contaminated by Exxon crude. My assignment: to investigate oil company frauds that led to to the disaster. There were plenty.
But before we brought charges, the Natives hoped to settle with the oil company, to receive just enough compensation to buy some boats and rebuild their island villages to withstand what would be a decade of trying to survive in a polluted ecological death zone.
In San Diego, I met with Exxon's US production chief, Otto Harrison, who said, "Admit it; the oil spill's the best thing to happen" to the Natives.
His company offered the Natives pennies on the dollar. The oil men added a cruel threat: take it or leave it and wait twenty years to get even the pennies. Exxon is immortal - but Natives die.
And they did. A third of the Native fishermen and seal hunters I worked with are dead. Now their families will collect one tenth of their award, two decades too late.
In today's ruling, Supreme Court Justice David Souter wrote that Exxon's recklessness was ''profitless'' - so the company shouldn't have to pay punitive damages. Profitless, Mr. Souter? Exxon and it's oil shipping partners saved billions - BILLIONS - by operating for sixteen years without the oil spill safety equipment they promised, in writing, under oath and by contract.
The official story is, "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." But don't believe it, Mr. Souter. Alaska's Native lands and coastline were destroyed by a systematic fraud motivated by profit-crazed penny-pinching. Here's the unreported story, the one you won't get tonight on the Petroleum Broadcast System:
It begins in 1969 when big shots from Humble Oil and ARCO (now known as Exxon and British Petroleum) met with the Chugach Natives, owners of the most valuable parcel of land on the planet: Valdez Port, the only conceivable terminus for a pipeline that would handle a trillion dollars in crude oil.
These Alaskan natives ultimately agreed to sell the Exxon consortium this astronomically valuable patch of land -- for a single dollar. The Natives refused cash. Rather, in 1969, they asked only that the oil companies promise to protect their Prince William Sound fishing and seal hunting grounds from oil.
In 1971, Exxon and partners agreed to place the Natives' specific list of safeguards into federal law. These commitment to safety reassured enough Congressmen for the oil group to win, by one vote, the right to ship oil from Valdez.
The oil companies repeated their promises under oath to the US Congress.
The spill disaster was the result of Exxon and partners breaking every one of those promises - cynically, systematically, disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill.
Forget the drunken skipper fable. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker's radar was left broken and disasbled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate.
For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was "state-of-the-art" on-ship radar.
We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline.
* Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, Erlene Blake, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, "The Miracle Barrel."
* In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply "not possible" to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows -- exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later.
* The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round- the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especiallly qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper.
In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos.
Today, twenty years after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station.
The cover story of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America's greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests -- the profit-driven disregard of the law -- made the spill an inevitability, not an accident.
Yet Big Oil tells us, as they plead to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, as Senator John McCain calls for drilling off the shores of the Lower 48, it can't happen again. They promise.
************Greg Palast is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow for Investigative Reporting at the Nation Institute, New York. Read and view his investigations for BBC Television at http://www.GregPalast.com. An earlier version of this report originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune.
recap of story -- just 10 years after
.../'... (50% down) Looking back, the Exxon Valdez accident seems like a case study in how to create a disaster. The 987-foot tanker had no tugboat escort as the crew maneuvered around ice floes, and Hazelwood, after a day of drinking, had left a lowly third mate in charge of the bridge. The Coast Guard couldn't even track the ship's progress because of range limits on its radar.
After the tanker ran aground - on a clear night on a well marked reef - officials at the oil facilities in Valdez took 10 crucial hours figuring out which emergency response equipment to send to the spill, allowing the slick to spread unchecked.
Later, when a virtual army was deployed to fight the spill - up to 10,000 workers, 1,000 boats, and 100 aircraft at a cost of $2.1 billion to Exxon, disorganization, along with potent tides and winds, repeatedly undermined containment. Ultimately, they recovered only a fraction of the oil, leaving tides and evaporation to do most of the work.
In the end, oil reached 1,300 miles of coastline and killed staggering numbers: 250,000 birds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 seals, 250 bald eagles, perhaps billions of salmon and herring larvae, according to the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, which manages Exxon settlement money.
The spill also devastated coastal communities such as Cordova, which saw its vital herring fishery closed after the spill, and New Chenega, a native village that had been destroyed before, by a 1964 earthquake. The oil that covered Sleepy Bay poisoned the Chenegans' clam beds.
Terrible as the immediate costs were, the bigger controversy centered on the longterm damage, if any, from the disaster. Exxon paid about $300 million in damage claims in the first few years after the spill, but lawyers for people who had been harmed called that a mere down payment on losses that averaged more than $200,000 per fisherman from 1990 to 1994.
Ten years later, the two sides are still arguing. In 1994, a federal jury in Anchorage awarded thousands of fishermen, natives, and property owners $5 billion in punitive damages for the spill, which Exxon has appealed, arguing that they were wrongly blamed for problems far beyond their accident. < atrocity or "accident" fits because there was DELIBERATE incompetence and absolute disregard for safety and RICO fraud about their fake "safety emergency teams..." ; hmm - kind of parallel to the NOLA "relief" disaster and the "WMD" lies about Iraq ; I guess there is no business better that rampant thievery // >
Wildlife still suffers
Almost as soon as the official cleanup ended in 1992, Exxon researchers began declaring ''the remarkable recovery'' of Prince William Sound. ''Resources in the spill-affected area are essentially recovered and... wildlife is present at levels within historic range,'' concluded Exxon's shareholder magazine in 1993.
True, some animals, such as bald eagles and, later, river otters, did seem to bounce back quickly. However, scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service say Exxon's claims are premature even now. Not only are some species, such as loons and harlequin ducks, showing no signs of recovering, but new research suggests that the Exxon Valdez spill may be killing today.
Wright of the National Marine Fisheries Service believes traces of Exxon Valdez oil among the rocks in salmon streams are killing eggs. Research at the service's Auke Bay Lab found that the tiny red eggs actually draw the oil to them..../...
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