Exxon Valdez
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/03/the-exxon-valdez-oil-spill-25-years-ago-today/100703/ images
The foul tenacity of the second-biggest single oil spill in U.S. waters, behind the 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP catastrophe, was a topic at this week's 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Hawaii. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, NOAA, and elsewhere explained that they were able to chemically fingerprint Exxon Valdez oil as far as hundreds of kilometers from the site of the accident. And it remains some fresh-looking goop, the USGS' Gail Irvine said: "The oil itself has hardly weathered and is similar to 11-day-old oil."
Petroleum that's left in an open environment is vulnerable to environmental stresses that help break it down, like sunlight, evaporation, and microbes. But what scientists have learned is that oil that seeps below the ground and under stones can remain intact for extremely long periods. That's what appears to be happening in Alaska: Boulders and cobbles are forming a kind of "armor" that's helping extend the slimy crude's lifespan toward immortality.
Still, the knowledge that healthy oil can hole up on beaches has a couple "silver linings" for handling future spills, according to Christopher Reddy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:...http://www.citylab.com/work/2014/02/blobs-exxon-valdez-oil-are-still-fresh-beaches/8523/
amy g; btsb: 1200 mi spill, 3200 mi shoreline, 10k sq mi
1993 fisheries collapsed; many fishermen in lawsuit are dying off now. 6K p 69
5B$ damages cut in 1/2 by appeals ct, then scotus cut to 500M
see palast alyeska
http://archive.truthout.org/slick-operator-the-bp-ive-known-too-well59178
joe romm:
The AP drops this bombshell today about the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster:
… the leader of botched containment efforts in the critical hours after the tanker ran aground wasn’t Exxon Mobil Corp. It was BP PLC, the same firm now fighting to plug the Gulf leak.
Pretty scary, when you consider that BP’s undersea volcano of oil is spewing some 2 Exxon Valdezes a week or more. That said, it bears repeating what 20-year veteran of the Coast Guard Dr. Robert Brulle has written: “With a spill of this magnitude and complexity, there is no such thing as an effective response.”
Here’s more from AP:
BP owned a controlling interest in the Alaska oil industry consortium that was required to write a cleanup plan and respond to the spill two decades ago. It also supplied the top executive of the consortium, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. Lawsuits and investigations that followed the Valdez disaster blamed both Exxon and Alyeska for a response that was bungled on many levels.
People who had a front row seat to the Alaska spill tell The Associated Press that BP’s actions in the Gulf suggest it hasn’t changed much at all.
The Gulf leak has grown to at least 6 million gallons since an oil rig exploded April 20, killing 11, and is almost certain to overtake Valdez as the nation’s worst oil spill.
“Gallons” is an AP correction from barrels but it is an uber-lowball number (see Expert: Based on video, BP undersea volcano spewing 3 million gallons a day “” two Exxon Valdezes a week)
Watching the current crisis is like reliving the Valdez disaster for an attorney who headed the legal team for the state-appointed Alaska Oil Spill Commission that investigated the 1989 spill.
“I feel this horrible, sickening feeling,” said Zygmunt Plater, who now teaches law at Boston College.
The Alaska spill occurred just after midnight on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez tanker carrying more than 50 million gallons of crude hit a reef after deviating from shipping lanes at the Valdez oil terminal. Years of cost cutting and poor planning led to staggering delays in response over the next five hours, according to the state commission’s report.
What could have been an oil spill covering a few acres became one that stretched 1,100 miles, said Walter Parker, the commission’s chairman.
“They were not prepared to respond at all,” Parker said, referring to Alyeska. “They did not have a trained team … The equipment was buried under several feet of snow.”
The commission’s report dedicated an entire chapter to failures by Alyeska, which was formed by the oil companies to run a pipeline stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Valdez terminal. BP had the biggest stake in the consortium and essentially ran the first days of containment efforts in Prince William Sound an inlet on the south coast of Alaska.
“What happened in Alaska was determined by decisions coming from (BP in) Houston,” Plater said.
Alyeska officials were notified within minutes of the Valdez spill, but it took seven hours for the consortium to get its first helicopter in the air with a Coast Guard investigator. A barge that was supposed to be carrying containment equipment had to be reloaded and did not arrive on the scene until 12 hours after the spill.
During the spill, Alyeska only had enough booms to surround a single tanker. The few skimmers it had to scoop up oil were out of commission once they filled up because no tank barge was available to handle recovered oil.
“Exxon quickly realized Alyeska was not responding, so 24 hours into the spill Exxon without consultation said, ‘We’re taking it over,’” said Dennis Kelso, former commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. “That was not necessarily a bad thing.”
BP’s role in the Valdez spill has been far less publicized than Exxon’s, in part because the state commission wanted to stay focused and avoid fingerpointing by saying who ran Alyeska in its report. Plater said he now regrets that approach.
“In retrospect, it could’ve focused attention on BP and created transparency which would’ve changed the internal culture,” he said. “As we see the internal culture appears not to have changed with tragic results.”
According to Alyeska, BP owned a controlling 50.01 percent share in the consortium in 1989, while a half-dozen other oil companies had smaller stakes. Since then, BP’s share in Alyeska has dropped to 46.9 percent, with the next highest owner Conoco-Phillips Inc. at 28.3 percent. The consortium works like a corporation with owners voting based on their percentage shares.
Alyeska’s chief executive officer was in 1989, and is currently, a BP employee who’s on the company payroll, said Alyeska spokeswoman Michelle Egan.
BP spokesman Robert Wine declined by e-mail to comment on the company’s role in the Valdez spill, saying the incident was already examined thoroughly.
“We can’t add to something that has been so thoroughly and publicly investigated in the past, and the results of which have been so robustly and effectively implemented,” he said.
Many who observed both disasters say there are striking parallels.
For example, during BP’s permit process for the Deepwater Horizon, the company apparently predicted a catastrophic spill was unlikely and if it were to happen, the company had the best technology available. Prior to the 1989 spill, Alyeska made a similar case, arguing that such a spill was unlikely and would be “further reduced because the majority of the tankers … are of American registry and all of these are piloted by licensed masters or pilots.”
Critics say the tools in both spills have been largely the same, as has BP’s lack of preparedness. Then as now, the cleanup tools used across the industry are booms, skimmers and dispersants.
David Pettit, who helped represent Exxon after the Alaska spill, said he knew BP was the “main player in Alyeska” even though everyone at the time was more focused on Exxon’s role.
“This is the same company that was drilling in 5,000 feet of water in 2010 knowing that what they had promised … was no more likely to do any good now than it did in 1989,” said Pettit, now a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s the same cleanup techniques.”
For the Gulf spill, a 100-ton containment box had to be built from scratch and wasn’t deployed until two weeks after the spill, leading some to question why such emergency measures weren’t ready to begin with.
“If you’ve told the government there’s not a serious risk of a major spill, why should you spend shareholder money building a 100-ton steel box you’ve publicly claimed you don’t think you’ll ever use?” said Pettit.
Precisely (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).
cointelpro on whistleblowers:
Lessons Learned: Exxon Valdez vs. Gulf Oil Spill
By Natterjack Press
The Yup'ik saw this. They saw hundreds of thousands of seabirds die. They saw thousands of sea otters die. They saw billions of salmon and herring die. This wasn't a dream; it was a very real nightmare. You may have heard of it—it was called the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
It all began on March 24, 1989, when the Exxon Valdez oil tanker grounded on a reef in Prince William Sound, 40 miles off the Alaskan coast. It spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea, contaminating about 1,300 miles of coastline. But for the Yup'ik and other southern Alaskans, the nightmare was just beginning.
"We had suicides, domestic violence, child abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, divorces, and we lost people in the community who went elsewhere," said Patience Andersen Faulkner, a Yup'ik from the Chugach people, on a recent visit to Louisiana coastal communities.
The sentiments of snowballing loss experienced by disaster survivors is echoed by social scientists.
J. Steven Picou, Professor of Sociology at the University of South Alabama, has for 30 years researched the impacts of disasters on communities. “These empirical findings are consistent with smaller studies of survivors of Three-Mile Island, Bhopal and Chernobyl,” he said, referring to the repercussions of past disasters.
These days, public anger is directed at BP, which had nothing to do with the Exxon Valdez spill...did it?
Actually, it did. BP was in up to its neck: It was in charge of the botched response to the spill. It was the major player in the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., which controls oil production in Alaska. Exxon, despite having its name on the ship, was a junior partner.Capt. James Woodle, who was then the Alyeska's Valdez port commander, stated that four years before the disaster, he reported the following to BP's Alaska chief, George Nelson: “Due to a reduction in manning, age of equipment, limited training and lack of personnel, serious doubt exists that [we] would be able to contain and clean up effectively a medium or large size oil spill.”
BP sought to bury this report and blackmail its author. As investigative journalist Greg Palast reported, “Alyeska showed Capt. Woodle a file of his marital infidelities (all bogus). It then offered him payouts on condition that he leave the state within days, promising never to return.”
Palast added, “Charles Hamel of Washington, D.C., shaken by evidence he received from Alyeska employees, warn[ed] BP executives in London about scandalous goings-on at Valdez.” BP thanked him. “Then a secret campaign was launched to hound him out of the industry. A CIA expert was hired to wiretap Hamel's phone lines, smuggle microphones into his home, intercept his mail and try to entrap him with young women. The industrial espionage caper was personally ordered and controlled by BP executive James Hermiller, President of Alyeska. A U.S. federal judge later told Alyeska this conduct was 'reminiscent of Nazi Germany'.”
Only in 2009—20 years after the oil spill—did Exxon start paying up. It has spent this time battling Alaskan coastal communities over damages, which were initially set by the court at $5 billion. Exxon has managed to get this slashed by 90 percent to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. There is still oil on Alaskan beaches. The fishing industry still hasn't recovered.
But don't worry: BP learned its lesson from the Exxon Valdez. Not lessons about safety or environmental protection, of course; BP has had a string of accidents, leaks and near misses over the last few years. Just recently, it spilled over 100,000 gallons of oil from its Alaska pipeline operation. This happened, according to state investigators, because “procedures weren't properly implemented.” Does this sound familiar? They did, however, learn lessons about oiling the wheels of power in their favor. In 2009, they spent $16 million on federal lobbying, with Louisiana's Sen. Mary Landrieu as the top congressional recipient.
The people of Louisiana and Florida are wondering, Why, given 20 years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill, did BP not put more time and money into preparing for another leak? The Yup'ik might remind them of Tony Hayward's words in 2009 when he said BP's “primary purpose was to generate profit for our shareholders” and that “[its] primary purpose in life was not to save the world.”
Chapter 7, continued By Greg Palast STEINHATCHEE, FLORIDA
We also needed witnesses. I needed insiders who would spill to outsiders. To find them, I needed a hound dog. I needed a blonde. I needed Lenora Stewart. Lenora is a Southern belle, very blond, with a light, lilting accent and the gentility of an alligator with indigestion, the gnarliest PI you’d ever want to avoid. If I ask Lenora to hunt down a deer, she’ll come back with just a bloody leg, burping with satisfaction. She grew up on the bad side of Steinhatchee, Florida (I’m not sure there was a good side), where drag races are still run on the hard beach sand. I needed Lenora to put her lovely claws on and dig. Her new assignment would be to convince people to put their careers, reputations, and fortunes on the firing line.
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SEATTLE, WASHINGTON But before heading to the far north, Lenora stopped in Washington State to meet with a man who could not chance setting foot in Alaska, Captain James Woodle, once Alyeska’s Marine Superintendent for the Port of Valdez. Years before the Exxon Valdez crack-up, in no-BS memos, Captain Woodlewarned the Alyeska chiefs that spill containment equipment was missing, busted, inadequate, a frightening joke. He was told to zip it. He didn’t. Alyeska waited, and watched. Then, on an icy day in February 1984, he went into colleague Henrietta Fuller’s office to use the copy machine, and closed the door to keep out the cold. He was in her office “from 0820 to 0840,” someone noted with military precision. This information, including a notation that Fuller later borrowed the Captain’s sweater, went all the way up to George Nelson, BP’s President of the Alaska oil consortium. And the order came down: Alyeska could now fire Woodle without fear he’ll squawk. The Captain’s immediate Alyeska supervisor waved the file at him: the absurd evidence of his twenty-minute “affair” and the threat that Woodle, a married man, could be smeared with it. The Captain wouldn’t back down: He insisted BP and Exxon were not prepared for an oil spill. The Captain was then relieved of his keys, his badge, fired for “insubordination,” and escorted from the docks.Woodle told his wife of the phonied-up “affair” file. But Alyeska held another card: The Captain was told that unless he kept his memos from the eyes of public and regulators, he wouldlose severance benefits. Furthermore, the Captain would have to agree, in writing, to leave Valdez, where he’d been a City Councilman, forever. Under the threat of financial ruin, he signed. But then, after the tanker hit, the Captain decided it was time to speak to us about the cover-ups and the threats. So, crucial equipment was missing. That’s stupidity, carelessness, negligence. But knowing it and concealing it, that’s fraud, a second “predicate act” necessary to bring a case under the RICO racketeering law. How do we know it was deliberate concealment? We talked to those ordered to do the concealing.
TANKER PORT, VALDEZ There were lots of oils spills in Alaska waters before the Exxon Valdez cracked. Smaller, true, but it would have signaled the system had gone to hell. BP’s Alyeska’s water samples would have picked up the traces of spilled oil. Lenora found Erlene Blake, a technician in the Alyeska testing lab. Erlene told us that Alyeska kept a bucket of oil-free seawater in the lab. If they found evidence of hydrocarbon in the Sound’s waters, they were directed to dump it down the sink and refill the sample vials from the bucket of clean water. They called it the Miracle Barrel. What else? The Chugach agreement to sign away Valdez imposed a requirement on the companies: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the several oil companies employ the latest chemical and other anti-pollution methods for protection of the fisheries, wild life and migratory birds at all times.” The state rules required it anyway, so the oil men agreed. You want equipment? Hey, we got it! The key piece of equipment would be state-of-the-art “containment barges” loaded with the best and newest Vikoma Ocean Packs, miles of rubber to hold in the oil and skimmers to suck up the oil caught by the rubber corral. In May 1977, as the first tankers left from Valdez, oil consortium honchos reassured worried State of Alaska environmental officials by promising two containment barges, one of them “. . . to be located near Bligh Island, which could double as a pilot station.” With these containment and skimmer vessels at “strategic locations along the coasts,” they assured the state, they could pick up all but a fraction of the biggest spill.
The BP-Alyeska plan was, I admit, pretty good-looking. On paper. But you can’t pick up much oil with a couple sheets of paper. The Exxon Valdez crashed right there at Bligh. Think about that. First off , if they’d put up the pilot station, there is no way on Earth that the tanker would have sailed right into it. Even a stone-drunk pilot would notice a supertanker bearing down on his kitchen. The ship would have been warned off . And if the equipment had been there, as I’ve told you, no one would remember the Exxon Valdez today. The rubber and the skimmer and suckers could have been set out in minutes, not days as happened. It would have been like a fire started across the street from a fire department. So where were the wondrous containment vessels? One of them simplydidn’t exist. The other was out of business for repairs, locked up in dry dock at Valdez, its equipment stored away in warehouses or locked in ice (this is Alaska). You could say that was dumb, the barges that weren’t there. But stupid is not fraud. Deliberate fibs are. To nail the racketeering charges, I had Lenora hunt through the state files looking for something that wasn’t there, “the dog that didn’t bark.” She confirmed: there was no record of a Notification of Nonreadiness per rule 18 AAC 75.340 and 75.350. We are supposed to hate all those nasty little regulations with strings of numbers and dots. But we have them because corporate powers can’t be trusted unless they are hog-tied in red tape. Unfortunately, the law assumes that oil companies are honest as nuns and would confess to not having working equipment and will voluntarily fill out a Notice of Nonreadiness and then shut down the entire pipeline system. No tanker can move from Valdez if the containment vessels are out of business, “Nonreadiness.” That is just plain common sense—and it’s the law. But it’s also expensive. A typical VLCC is hauling $50 million in crude. Ten ships backed up means half a billion dollars just sitting on its ass and waiting. BP and the gang could not let that happen. So they lied. That is, they elided. They didn’t fill out the Nonreadiness form, and they let the Exxon Valdez sail. Even when the ship was bleeding oil, Alyeska kept up the con. From the ship, Inspector Lawn radioed Alyeska, wanting to know when the heck the containment vessel would arrive. Alyeska’s Bill Shier radioed back, “It’s on its way, Dan. On its way.” The truth was, it hadn’t left the dock. It finally showed up fourteen hours after the grounding. By that time, the slick was spread over a hundred square miles of water and was on the move. There wasn’t enough rubber boom in the world to corral it.
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PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND, ALASKA You can’t run supertankers through danger zones without a team of first responders ready to jump if stuff happens. It’s like a fire department for oil shipping. Congress demanded it, the regulators required it, and the oil companies promised it. Humble Exxon and ARCO, to sucker in the Natives out of their property, promised the Chugach all the response team jobs as the “good consideration” in the purchase contract for Valdez where the price is stated as, “One dollar and other good consideration.” BP’s Alyeska came through on this promise. They trained the Natives to drop from helicopters, lay protective boom, run skimmers, and be ready to roll 24/7. It wasn’t seal hunting, but it was money. And then BP fired them all. After seven years, once the Natives helped the company break the Teamsters Union, the Natives were dumped, and for more than a decade the full-time spill response crews required by contract and law were manned by ghosts. Alyeska just grabbed some names off its payroll and dubbed them “oil spill response” crew. A few were given enough training and a minimum of equipment for “showtime”—inspections. Covering up of the elimination of the Native emergency response crews was not easy. How do you make Natives simply disappear? How do you shut down the fire department without someone noticing? Someone did notice: Inspector Lawn. The man is fueled by suspicion, a walking accusation machine—and always correct. Always. Based on his detective’s sense of smell, the Inspector wrote a memo dated May 1, 1984, wondering if the BP consortium had secretly eliminated its “dedicated force” for spills.
A surprise inspection was needed. But Alyeska doesn’t like surprises. BP’s oil group insisted that it be given notice of the “surprise” reviews. On November 4, 1986, Alyeska informed the government: “This is written to provide information to use in planning the unannounced spill drill. . . . November 19 would be the best day. . . .” BP kindly suggested a couple other days and times when, with sufficient notice, they would allow a surprise inspection. But Inspector Lawn, on his own, showed up unannounced for an unannounced inspection. BP, caught with its corporate pants down, screamed to its political friends in the government. Lawn was demoted, no longer an inspector, locked to a desk and hung out the window by his heels as a warning to other inspectors who dreamed of surprises. A union complaint got Lawn’s badge back. But Alyeska wasn’t done with him. They tapped his phone. British Petroleum’s chief in the United States hired Wackenhut Corporation to listen in on The Inspector just doing his job. (I’d investigated these Wackenhut guys, now operating under the alias “Geo,” for negligent homicide, child rape, and espionage.* Nice guys.) They were trying to get something on The Inspector to stop him from talking to Congress. They got nothing. Brutal doesn’t mean competent. And luckily, they were incompetent enough to get caught. I don’t think BP minded that: The word went forth that these Brits didn’t hold their teacups with their pinkies in the air. Another state inspector wrote a memo moaning that “I would like to see an unannounced spill drill scheduled for, say, ten “.#. January 2.” But he didn’t dare, lest he got BP’s Inspector Lawn treatment. On the night the Exxon Valdez hit their reef, the oil spill response team at Gary Kompkoff ’s village, stripped of their jobs, authority, and equipment, just watched hemorrhaging crude flow by, helpless. Now I was up to four frauds committed upon the Natives, not to mention the con job on regulators:
PROMISE #1: State-of-the-art radar. Missing, and non-operation concealed. PROMISE #2: Oil spill equipment. Missing, and absence concealed. PROMISE #3: Spill containment barges. Not operating, not loaded, condition concealed. PROMISE #4: Work on the spill response teams. The jobs were terminated, and danger concealed. So, in giving up Valdez, the Natives, as my dad would say, were “screwed, blued, and tattooed.” So were Congress, the regulators, and the public. However, screwing the public is not a crime. But racketeering is. For racketeering charges to stick, I needed a conspiracy. Let me stop here and talk about conspiracies. “Conspiracy” has gotten a bad rap of late. When I’m on American TV, I can assume I’ll be called “a conspiracy nut.” It always gets a laugh—from the conspirators. I’m not a conspiracy nut but a conspiracy expert. “Conspiracy” as I’d describe it in a courtroom is nothing more than an agreement between two or more parties, acting in secret, acting in concert, who know their scheme is going to hurt someone. To file a RICO claim, I’d need a conspiracy. With these guys, it was like picking one chocolate from a big candy heart. This one would do. . . . - See more at: http://www.themudflats.net/archives/25919#sthash.mnCSnjyj.dpuf