[NYTr] 1989-2007: Exxon Still Won't Pay for Oil Spill

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[At a time when multiple massive oil spills are killing wildlife (and
some humans) around the globe, this commentary on an 18-year-old
catastrophe seems appropriate. -NY Transfer]


Prensa Latina, Havana
http://www.plenglish.com

Opinion:

1989-2007: Exxon Still Won't Pay for Oil Spill

Washington, Nov 5 (Prensa Latina) Eighteen years after one of the
greatest ecological disasters ever, the US Supreme Court has decided to
hear Exxon Mobil's reasons why it should not pay the $2.5 billion
punitive award of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

The town of Cordova, Alaska, has taken the news hard, writes Riki Otti,
neighbor of that small fishing community which bore the brunt of the
largest crude oil spill in America's waters, for Alternews.com on
Monday.

To us, says Otti, the case is about justice and reparation --a promise
Exxon made to the community five days after the spill. A promise that
Exxon broke before the trial even started five years after the spill,
that is, 13 years ago.

The plaintiffs say the punitive award should be restored to the full $5
billion that a jury of peers decided was necessary to punish the
corporate giant back in 1994.

US corporations have outgrown America's justice system, denounces the
author. The system won't work for any community in America that is
traumatized by disaster that triggers class action lawsuits --
hurricanes like Katrina, terrorist acts like 9 11, or oil spills like
the Exxon Valdez.

It might surprise people who live outside Alaska to learn that
taxpayers, not Exxon, paid a majority of the 2.5 billion dollars spent
in cleaning up the mess and another billion in penalties.

Exxon recouped most of its remaining expense from its insurance
companies and from money it paid to settle damages for natural
resources --publicly-owned wildlife and lands, reveals Otti.

The spilled oil -- somewhere between 11 to 38 million gallons (the
figure is elusive because as we learned the hard way, the truth was one
of the first casualties of the spill), writes Otti.

No other country in the world has a legal system that is as
adversarial, costly, formal and complex as the United States system,
says this survivor of the spill who owned and fished a salmon drift
permit in Prince William Sound until he sold out after the fish run
collapses in the early 1990s.

The emotional and health impact on the population is still worse.
Sociologists Drs. Steve Picou and Duane Gill have studied the evolution
of disaster trauma in Cordova since the spill.

They report a third of the fisher-claimants in Cordova suffer from
clinical depression, nearly 40 percent from Post Traumatic Syndrome,
and 60 percent hold off-season jobs to make ends meet.

Finally, the author of the forthcoming book Not One Drop: Promises,
Betrayal, and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill
(Chelsea Green, 2008) calls on US citizens to make the change come true.

There is little hope, he concludes, that the Supreme Court, or any
other branch of the current judicial system, will take it upon itself
to keep from doing more harm to those it was designed to protect.

ef

PL-27