Twenty years ago today, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker ran aground in Alaska's Prince Williams Sound. Two decades on, despite reporting profits of $45.2 billion in 2008, the oil company responsible, Exxon Mobil, is only just beginning to make good on the court-mandated (and vastly reduced) $507.5 million settlement due to the Natives and local fisherman whose lives were devastated by the resulting oil spill.

Fearing the effects such an incident might cause, the fishermen and local communities fought for years to prevent the construction of the oil pipeline that feeds the hungry tankers at the Port of Valdez. Experts had deemed the enclosed geography of the Prince William Sound, in which the port lies, particularly unforgiving should a spill occur, and the courts were responsive to their arguments, issuing an injunction to stop the pipeline in its tracks. When the Supreme Court declined to hear Big Oil's appeal, pressure was put on the government who then rewrote the law, amending the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 and the National Environmental Policy Act to favor the interests of the oil companies.

The pipeline was built and environmental baseline studies the EPA would have otherwise insisted on were never carried out. This meant after the spill it was easy for Exxon to fudge the data on its effect on the delicate Prince Williams Sound eco-system. Meanwhile, with an eye on the nickels and dimes, Exxon systematically avoided and ignored the safety regulations and precautions that were in play. When the "accident" occurred, the tanker was sailing out of the Port of Valdez in a channel intended exclusively for inbound traffic. The substitute-skipper at the helm of the vessel, which was carrying an estimated 53 million US gallons of oil when it ran aground, might have avoided obstacle (a well-charted reef) had its sonar been in operation. But, as investigative journalist and Exxon expert Greg Palast reported in yesterday's SG Newswire column, "the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef."

In this excerpt from Buzzflash's four part series on the Exxon Valdez disaster and its ongoing fallout, Meg White uncovers the ongoing human cost in the face of Exxon's record profits.



The captain of the Exxon Valdez, a man described in later court documents as a "relapsed alcoholic," was in his quarters when he should have been piloting the ship, and the men he assigned to take his place weren't properly rested. The ship obtained special permission to exit the Prince William Sound through the inbound shipping lane. The ship came too close to shore and was grounded on the Bligh Reef, a well-known obstacle in the area, just after midnight on March 24, 1989.

Immediately after the spill, delays and mishaps interfered with the clean-up. The fishermen and the townspeople of Cordova, Alaska, who relied on the waters for their very existence, were worried. But the president of Exxon assured them they would all be taken care of. Exxon President Dan Cornett even called the incident a blessing in disguise for Alaskans while addressing a crowd of Cordovans gathered in concern after the disaster:

The opposite turned out to be the case. For the past two decades, Exxon has dragged its corporate feet in court while Alaskans have struggled to cope with the after effects of the spill. Communities such as Cordova still report cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome, along with continuing increases in divorce, bankruptcy, and suicide rates.

Cordova, AK, a small fishing town on the coast of Prince Williams Sound was devastated by the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in March 1989. While environmental and social fallout persists, Cordova has not been able to get back on its financial feet, despite promises from Exxon to make the community whole again.

Cordova, with a population of just less than 2,500 according to the most recent census data available, was one of the most hard hit when 11 million gallons of oil spread along the Alaskan coast. It was the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Life has been especially tough on the fishermen of Cordova.

John Platt is a third-generation Alaska fisherman. He's incensed by the way Exxon and the government have treated him. "We fought tooth and nail not to have the pipeline in there," Platt said. "And here we are, 38 years later and what we feared would happen happened and nobody seems to give a damn."

Though appellate courts have consistently reaffirmed the need for compensation for damages in the case, Supreme Court rulings whittled down the legally permissible amount of the award.

The original amount of punitive damages to be paid to the fishermen was $5 billion. That amount was reduced to 4 billion, raised back up to $4.5 billion, then cut to $2.5 billion, then further reduced to $507 million. A Supreme Court ruling is expected soon on whether Exxon should pay interest on this payment after 20 years of waiting.

In a recent interview with In These Times, Cordova fisherwoman and marine biologist Riki Ott addressed the injustice of the Exxon settlement being whittled down:

Meanwhile, the fishermen of Cordova are worried about what that ultimate payment might mean. Of the original 32,000 plaintiffs against Exxon, 8,000 have liens on their settlements, meaning most if not all of the money Exxon owes them will go straight to the government. But the kicker is this: They'll still have to pay thousands in taxes on the supposed "windfall."

Commercial fishing in Alaska requires a great deal of initial investment. Not only will boats and equipment set you back tens of thousands of dollars, but also the fishing permits are expensive as well. The value of the permits depends upon the productive output of the Sound, so when fish levels crash, so do the value of the permits.

Platt took out a loan for $235,000 to get his permits, using the value of one paid-off permit and the other two purchased on credit to secure the loan. But when the value of his permits for fishing both herring and salmon plummeted after the oil spill, the Alaska Division of Investment found him to be "under-collateralized."

On top of that, there weren't any fish to catch, so his income has fallen precipitously. He said there are days where "had I left the boat tied up, I would have been better off." His salmon permit does pay off some years, but the herring catch is another story.

"We haven't had a herring season in 15 of the last 17 years," Platt said. Salmon has been a more stable population, but prices have crashed. In 1988, Platt said he was paid around $1 a pound for salmon, but the ten-year average between 1992 and 2002 was 11 cents a pound.

With such a volatile income stream, paying off his debt has been difficult for Platt. Even though he's paid about $130,000 on the loan, the amount he owes has roughly doubled from that original $235,000. The money he expects to get from Exxon won't even pay off his debt in full, and he'll have to pay taxes on the damages as well.

Platt hired a bankruptcy lawyer to create a payment plan with the state. He had to sell his salmon seine boat "for pennies on the dollar" and give all the proceeds to the state.

Platt paid off both his fishing boats thanks to money he was paid to help clean up after the spill. Paying off those debts seemed like a prudent move at the time, but Platt thinks of other ways he could have used the money to his advantage.

"If I just would've invested it all in Exxon stock, I would've been fine," Platt laughed.

Alaska House Bill 96, sponsored by Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Haines), would forgive the interest owed on loans that are secured by liens on money from Exxon Valdez damages claims. Platt tried to be upbeat about the bill's prospects, but this is looking like another disappointment. He was told by a state legislative aide that the bill is good as dead due to legal issues such as equal protection.

Exxon's bid to get out of paying interest on the $507 million might have more of a chance than the fishermen's. Not that Exxon is in financial dire straits. At the end of January 2009, Exxon reported that it once again broke its own astonishing profit records. Last year, the company earned profits of $40.61 billion, topping its 2006 record. The $507 million they are estimated to be required to pay out in damages is a little more than 1 percent of the company's profit last year.

While Exxon's profits don't seem to be much endangered, there are signs that fishing the Prince Williams Sound will continue to be difficult. While salmon has fluctuated in the past 20 years, the herring season has been canceled by the state almost every year since the spill, due to unsustainable population numbers. Not only have their numbers been down, but also the herring that do show up to spawn arrive covered in lesions, bleeding internally and swimming erratically.

Scientists hesitate to equate the disease, called viral hemorrhagic septicemia virus (VHSV), directly with the Exxon Valdez disaster, but for Platt, it was "definitely a smoking gun." Showing up for the first time in Alaskan herring populations after the oil spill, VHSV persists today, and is one of the reasons the state has said it will once again cancel the entire herring season in 2009.

Still, thanks to a "halfway decent season" using his remaining salmon boat, Platt said he was able to help his two boys out a little this year. But still, he describes the situation as precarious. He's already sold his house and he's trying to avoid bankruptcy. It's a story you hear all the time in this tough financial environment, but Platt and the rest of Cordova have been living like this for 20 years, with no end in sight.

***

A major contributor to the record-breaking nature of the disaster was the shoddy job Exxon did in removing the oil in the first place. There were significant initial delays and confusion over what methods should be used in the clean up.

The problem was attitudinal as well. Exxon perceived that it had a huge public relations disaster on its hands, not an ecological one. Instead of listening to experts on oil pollution clean up methods, Exxon sent workers to beaches to blast the area with 140-degree water. The water merely pushed the oil out of sight, while effectively boiling the plant and animal life that is thought to aid clean up.

The now-defunct U.S. Office of Technology Assessment estimated that initial clean up efforts had only removed three to four percent of the oil spilled. The huge deposits of oil remaining underground have been described by one government scientist as "land mines that will cause chronic harm to successive generations" of fauna in Alaska.

Exxon has produced several studies claiming there are no environmental effects from the spill, which have been denounced by scientists of virtually every stripe.

The tamping down of information began immediately after the spill on March 24, 1989. Fishermen such as John Platt were paid by Exxon to help in the clean up efforts, but before they were hired they had to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

"I could not say or do anything that would be detrimental to Exxon," Platt recalled. "In other words, it was hush money."

Platt said he didn't talk to anyone at the time about the clean up process, for fear of losing the only job he could be sure of in that moment. He said he knew one man who did lose his temporary clean up job because he talked to the press.

The story of the Exxon Valdez oil spill was a complex and unprecedented one, and reporters who flocked to Alaska to cover the story for far away national outlets were easily confused. Riki Ott, an Alaskan marine biologist and fisherwoman, was called in at the scene and saw firsthand how Exxon whitewashed the story for the media and the American public. She documents in her 2008 book, Not One Drop, the lies Exxon told about everything from the amount of oil spilled to the success of clean up efforts.

But the lies didn't stop in 1989. Exxon continually brought its own scientists to conduct studies on Prince William Sound, with their most recent, undated "report" appearing to be from 2005. The company's scientists repeatedly reported no long-term damage, despite the fact that everyone else -- from government to private to nonprofit experts -- disagreed with their assertions.

The company caused untold death and destruction, and denied responsibility at every turn. Even their failed clean up efforts ended in misery. Clean up workers are still sick from the dangerous chemicals Exxon used to burnish its image (the efforts failed to actually restore Prince William Sound, but succeeded in forcing the oil and toxic materials underground, where the public couldn't see it). Some workers are suffering from respiratory and neurological disorders to this day. Others have died from restoration-related illnesses.

Still, the story never seems to stick. Exxon is still the world's largest publicly-traded international oil company and continues to make record profits year after year. Platt calls Exxon "the Teflon corporation," and is frustrated by the amount of influence the company exudes.

"It's a sad, sad comment" on society, Platt said. "[Exxon is] basically setting policy, molding our judicial system -- I don't know. It's almost gotten to the point -- it makes me scratch my head -- they as a corporation have more rights than that of the individual."

Exxon found that the disinformation campaign worked so well in the Prince William Sound that there was no reason not to launch others. The Union of Concerned Scientists released a study in 2007 that found Exxon had spent almost $16 million over a seven-year period funding pseudo-scientific groups to disseminate false information challenging the existence and cause of global warming.

"When one looks closely, Exxon Mobil's underhanded strategy is as clear and indisputable as the scientific research it's meant to discredit," said Seth Shulman, an investigative journalist who wrote the report. "The paper trail shows that, to serve its corporate interests, Exxon Mobil has built a vast echo chamber of seemingly independent groups with the express purpose of spreading disinformation about global warming."

Exxon's funding of "trinket tanks" and pseudo scientists goes full-circle when the information they generate is used by politicians to defend policies that favor oil companies. Ever wonder where Sarah Palin got that junk science about polar bears? You guessed it: Exxon. And what is a major barrier to expanding Arctic oil exploration? Endangered species such as the polar bear.

An important point for lawmakers to realize here is the strong possibility of guilt by association. As Dune Lankard, a fisherman, Alaska Native and conservationist from Prince William Sound put it after the Exxon settlement was further reduced last year: "From here on out we will never ever trust the oil industry, government or the courts."


Thanks to Buzzflash's editor Mark Karlin and senior journalist Meg White for allowing us to reprint this article. The full text can be found on the links below:

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

"Gail, Please! Stick your hand in it!"

The petite Eskimo-Chugach woman gave me that you-dumb-ass-white-boy look.

"Gail, Gail. STICK YOUR GODDAMN HAND IN IT!"

She stuck it in, under the gravel of the beach at Sleepy Bay, her village's fishing ground. Gail's hand came up dripping with black, sickening goo. It could make you vomit. Oil from the Exxon Valdez.

It was already two years after the spill and Exxon had crowed that Mother Nature had happily cleaned up their stinking oil mess for them. It was a lie. But the media wouldn't question the bald-faced bullshit. And who the hell was going to investigate Exxon's claim way out in some godforsaken Native village in the Prince William Sound?

So I convinced the Natives to fly the lazy-ass reporters out to Sleepy Bay on rented float planes to see the oil that Exxon said wasn't there.

The reporters looked, but didn't see it, because it was three inches under their feet, under the shingle rock of the icy beach. Gail pulled out her hand and now the whole place smelled like a gas station. The network crews wanted to puke. And now, with their eyes open, they saw the oil, the vile feces-colored smear across the glaciated ridge faces, the poisonous "bathtub ring" that ran for miles and miles at the high tide level.

And it's still there. Less for sure. But twenty years later. IT'S STILL THERE, GODDAMNIT. And I want YOU, dear reader, to stick your hand in it. I want YOU, President Obama, to stick your hand in it before you blithely fulfill your Palin-esque campaign promise for a little more offshore drilling.

***

Tuesday marks the 20th Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez grounding and the smearing of 1,200 miles of Alaska's coastline with its oil.

It also marks the 20th Anniversary of a lie. Lots of lies: catalogued in a four-volume investigation of the disaster; four volumes you'll never see. I wrote that report, with my team of investigators working with the Natives preparing fraud and racketeering charges against Exxon. You'll never see the report because Exxon lawyers threatened the Natives, "Mention the f-word [fraud] and you'll never get a dime" of compensation to clean up the villages. The Natives agreed to drop the fraud charge -- and Exxon stiffed them on the money. You're surprised, right?

***

Doubtless, for the 20th Anniversary of the Great Spill, the media will schlep out that old story that the tanker ran aground because its captain was drunk at the wheel. Bullshit.

Yes, the captain was "three sheets to the wind" -- but sleeping it off below-decks. The ship was in the hands of the third mate who was driving blind. That is, the Exxon Valdez' Raycas radar system was turned off; turned off because it was busted and had been busted since its maiden voyage. Exxon didn't want to spend the cash to fix it. So the man at the helm, electronically blindfolded, drove it up onto the reef.

So why the story of the drunken skipper? Because it lets Exxon off the hook: Calling it a case of "drunk driving" turns the disaster into a case of human error, not corporate penny-pinching greed.

Indeed, the "human error" tale was the hook used by the Bush-stacked Supreme Court to slash the punitive damages awarded against Exxon by 90%, from $5 billion, to half a billion for 30,000 Natives and fishermen. Chief Justice John Roberts erased almost all of the payment due with the la-dee-dah comment, "What more can a corporation do?"

Well, here's what they could have done: Besides fix the radar, Exxon could have set out equipment to contain the spill. Containing a spill is actually quite simple. Stick a rubber skirt around the oil slick and suck it back up. The law requires it and Exxon promised it.

So, when the tanker hit, where was the rubber skirt and where was the sucker? Answer: The rubber skirt, called "boom" -- was a fiction. Exxon promised to have it sitting right there near the Native village at Bligh Reef. The oil company fulfilled that promised the cheap way: they lied.

And the lie was engineered at the very top. After the spill, we got our hands on a series of memos describing a secret meeting of chief executives of Exxon and its oil company partners, including ARCO, a unit of British Petroleum. In a meeting of these oil chieftains held in April 1988, ten months before the spill, Exxon rejected a plea from T.L. Polasek, the Vice-President of its Alaska shipping operations, to provide the oil spill containment equipment required by law. Polasek warned the CEOs it was "not possible" to contain a spill in the mid-Sound without the emergency set-up.

Exxon angrily vetoed ARCO's suggestion that the oil companies supply the rubber skirts and other materiel that would have prevented the spill from spreading, virtually eliminating the spill's damage.

Regulations state that no tanker may leave the Alaska port of Valdez without the "sucker" equipment, called a "containment barge," at the ready. Exxon signed off on the barge's readiness. But, that night twenty years ago, the barge was in dry-dock with its pumps locked up under arctic ice. By the time it arrived at the tanker, half a day after the spill, the oil was well along its thousand-mile killing path.

Natives watched as the now-unstoppable oil overwhelmed their islands. Eyak Native elder Henry Makarka saw an otter rip out its own eyes burning from oil residue. Henry, pointing down a waterside dead-zone, told me, in a mix of Alutiiq and English, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."

***

Exxon promised -- promised -- to pay the Natives and other fisherman for all their losses. The Chief of the Natives at Nanwalek lost his boat to bankruptcy. His village, like other villages, Native and non-Native, decayed into alcoholism. The Mayor of fishing port Cordova killed himself, citing Exxon in his suicide note.

On the island village of Chenega, Gail Evanoff's uncle Paul Kompkoff was hungry. Until the spill, he had lived on seal meat, razor clams and salmon Chenegans would catch, and on deer they hunted. The clams and salmon were declared deadly and the deer, not able to read the government warning signs, ate the poisoned vegetation and died.

The President of Exxon, Lee Raymond, helicoptered into Chenega for a photo op. He promised to compensate the Natives and all fishermen for their losses, and Exxon would thoroughly clean the beaches.

Uncle Paul told the Exxon chief of his hunger. The oil company, sensing PR disaster, shipped in seal meat to the isolated village. The cans were marked, "NOT FIT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION." Uncle Paul said, "Zoo food."

Paul didn't want a seal in a can. He wanted a boat to go fishing, to bring the village back to life.

Two years after the spill, Otto Harrison, General Manager of Exxon USA, told Evanoff and me to forget about a fishing boat for Uncle Paul. Exxon was immortal and Natives were not. The company would litigate for 20 years.

They did. Only now, two decades on, Exxon has finally begun its payout of the court award -- but only ten cents on the dollar. And Uncle Paul's boat? No matter. Paul's dead. So are a third of the fishermen owed the money.

***

Lee Raymond, President of Exxon at the time of the spill -- and its President when the company made the secret decision to do without oil spill equipment, retired in April 2006. The company awarded him a $400 million retirement bonus, more than double the bonuses received by all AIG executives combined.

***

Gail's oily hand never made it to national television. The networks were distracted with another oil story.

After sailing back to Chenega from Sleepy Bay, I sat with Uncle Paul, watching the smart bombs explode over Baghdad. Gulf War I had begun.

Uncle Paul was silent a long time. The generals on CNN pointed to the burning oil fields near Basra. Paul said, "I guess were all some kind of Native now."



Greg Palast investigated fraud and racketeering claims for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. Now a journalist whose work appears on BBC Television Newsnight, Palast is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. Visit GregPalast.com for more.

Move over Exxon Valdez, there is a new oil spill on the block. Israeli air raids on a Lebanese power plant may have caused an oil spill bigger than the Alaskan disaster in 1989. The Valdez spill was caused by a drunk tanker captain, while the Mediteranean spill was caused by an Israeli military drunk on bombing.

The UN Environment Program released a statement Tuesday.

12,000 tons of leaking oil has already polluted more than 87 miles of the Lebanese coast and is spreading north into Syrian waters. The oil is apparently worse than a normal spill because it was power plant fuel. It is described as a toxic cocktail.