[R-G] A well-designed disaster: the untold story of the Exxon Valdez

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From
http://www.theecologist.org/archive_article.html?article=440&category=60
A well-designed disaster: the untold story of the Exxon Valdez

Date Published: 31 October 2003
Author: Greg Palast

Fifteen years after the world's most notorious oil spill, ExxonMobil has
still not paid for the damage it caused and the story of what really
happened has not yet been told. Award-winning investigative journalist Greg
Palast exposes the cover-up.


On March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez broke open and covered twelve hundred
miles of Alaska’s shoreline with oily sludge.

The official story remains "Drunken Skipper Hits Reef." Don’t believe it. In
fact, when the ship hit, Captain Joe Hazelwood was nowhere near the wheel,
but belowdecks, sleeping off his bender. The man left at the helm, the third
mate, would never have hit Bligh Reef had he simply looked at his Raycas
radar. But he could not, because the radar was not turned on. The complex
Raycas system costs a lot to operate, so frugal Exxon management left it
broken and useless for the entire year before the grounding.

The land Exxon smeared and destroyed belongs to the Chugach natives of the
Prince William Sound. Within days of the spill, the Chugach tribal
corporation asked me and my partner Lenora Stewart to investigate
allegations of fraud by Exxon and the little-known "Alyeska" consortium. In
three years’ digging, we followed a twenty-year train of doctored safety
records, illicit deals between oil company chiefs, and programmatic
harassment of witnesses. And we documented the oil majors’ brilliant success
in that old American sport, cheating the natives. Our summary of evidence
ran to four volumes. Virtually none of it was reported: The media had turned
off its radar. Here’s a bit of the story you’ve never been told:

We discovered an internal memo describing a closed, top-level meeting of oil
company executives in Arizona held just ten months before the spill. It was
a meeting of the "Alyeska Owners Committee," the six-company combine that
owns the Alaska pipeline and most of the state’s oil. In that meeting, say
the notes, the chief of their Valdez operations, Theo Polasek, warned
executives that containing an oil spill "at the mid-point of Prince William
Sound not possible with present equipment" – exactly where the Exxon Valdez
grounded. Polasek needed millions of dollars for spill-containment
equipment. The law required it, the companies promised it to regulators,
then at the meeting, the proposed spending was voted down. The oil company
combine had a cheaper plan to contain any spill – don’t bother. According to
an internal memorandum, they’d just drop some dispersants and walk away.
That’s exactly what happened. "At the owners committee meeting in Phoenix,
it was decided that Alyeska would provide immediate response to oil spills
in Valdez Arm and Valdez Narrows only" – not the Prince William Sound.

Smaller spills before the Exxon disaster would have alerted government
watchdogs that the port’s oil-spill-containment system was not up to
scratch. But the oil group’s lab technician, Erlene Blake, told us that
management routinely ordered her to change test results to eliminate
"oil-in-water" readings. The procedure was simple, says Blake. She was told
to dump out oily water and refill test tubes from a bucket of cleansed sea
water, which they called "the Miracle Barrel."

A confidential letter dated April 1984, fully four years before the big
spill, written by Captain James Woodle, then the oil group’s Valdez Port
commander, warns management that "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." Woodle told us there was a spill at Valdez before the Exxon
Valdez collision, though not nearly as large. When he prepared to report it
to the government, his supervisor forced him to take back the notice, with
the Orwellian command, "You made a mistake. This was not an oil spill."

Slimey Limeys
The canard of the alcoholic captain has provided effective camouflage for a
party with arguably more culpability than Exxon: British Petroleum, the
company that in 2001 painted itself green (literally: all its gas stations
and propaganda pamphlets now sport a seasick green hue). Alaska’s oil is BP
oil. The company owns and controls a near majority (46 percent) of the
Alaska pipeline system. Exxon (now ExxonMobil) is a junior partner, and four
other oil companies are just along for the ride. Captain Woodle, Technician
Blake, Vice President Polasek, all worked for BP’s Alyeska.

Quite naturally, British Petroleum has never rushed to have its name
associated with Alyeska’s recklessness. But BP’s London headquarters, I
discovered, knew of the alleged falsification of reports to the U.S.
government nine years before the spill. In September 1984, independent oil
shipper Charles Hamel of Washington, DC, shaken by evidence he received from
Alyeska employees, told me he took the first available Concorde, at his own
expense, to warn BP executives in London about scandalous goings-on in
Valdez. Furthermore, Captain Woodle swears he personally delivered his list
of missing equipment and "phantom" personnel directly into the hands of BP’s
Alaska chief, George Nelson.

BP has never been eager for Woodle’s letter, Hamel’s London trip and many
other warnings of the deteriorating containment system to see the light of
day. When Alyeska got wind of Woodle’s complaints, they responded by showing
Woodle a file of his marital infidelities (all bogus), then offered him
payouts on condition that he leave the state within days, promising never to
return.
As to Hamel, the oil shipping broker, BP in London thanked him. Then a
secret campaign was launched to hound him out of the industry. A CIA expert
was hired who wiretapped Hamel’s phone lines. They smuggled microphones into
his home, intercepted his mail and tried to entrap him with young women. The
industrial espionage assault was personally ordered and controlled by BP
executive James Hermiller, president of Alyeska. On this caper, they were
caught. A U.S. federal judge told Alyeska this conduct was "reminiscent of
Nazi Germany."

Cheaper Than Manhattan
BP’s inglorious role in the Alaskan oil game began in 1969 when the oil
group bought the most valuable real estate in all Alaska, the Valdez oil
terminal land, from the Chugach natives. BP and the Alyeska group paid the
natives one dollar.
Arthur Goldberg, once a U.S. Supreme Court justice, tried to help the
natives on their land claim. But the natives’ own lawyer, the state’s most
powerful legislator, advised them against pressing for payment. Later, that
lawyer became Alyeska’s lawyer.

The Alaskan natives, the last Americans who lived off what they hunted and
caught, did extract written promises from the oil consortium to keep the
Prince William Sound safe from oil spills. These wilderness seal hunters and
fishermen knew the arctic sea. Eyak Chief-for-Life Agnes Nichols, Tatitlek
native leader George Gordaoff and Chenega fisherman Paul Kompkoff demanded
that tankers carry state-of-the-art radar and that emergency vessels escort
the tankers. The oil companies reluctantly agreed to put all this in their
government-approved 1973 Oil Spill Response Plan.

When it comes to oil spills, the name of the game is "containment" because,
radar or not, some tanker somewhere is going to hit the rocks. Stopping an
oil spill catastrophe is a no-brainer. Tanker radar aside, if a ship does
smack a reef, all that’s needed is to surround the ship with a big rubber
curtain ("boom") and suck up the corralled oil. In signed letters to the
state government and Coast Guard, BP, ExxonMobil and partners promised that
no oil would move unless the equipment was set on the tanker route and the
oil-sucker ship ("containment barge") was close by, in the water and ready
to go.

The oil majors fulfilled their promise the cheapest way: They lied. When the
Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef, the spill equipment, which could have
prevented the catastrophe, wasn’t there – see the Arizona meeting notes
above. The promised escort ships were not assigned to ride with the tankers
until after the spill. And the night the Exxon Valdez grounded, the
emergency spill-response barge was sitting in a dry dock in Valdez locked in
ice.

When the pipeline opened in 1974, the law required Alyeska to maintain
round-the-clock oil-spill-response teams. As part of the come-on to get hold
of the Chugach’s Valdez property, Alyeska hired the natives for this
emergency work. The natives practiced leaping out of helicopters into icy
water, learning to surround leaking boats with rubber barriers. But the
natives soon found they were assigned to cover up spills, not clean them up.
Their foreman, David Decker, told me he was expected to report one oil spill
as two gallons when two thousand gallons had spilled.

Alyeska kept the natives at the terminal for two years – long enough to help
Alyeska break the strike of the dock workers’ union – then quietly sacked
the entire team. To deflect inquisitive inspectors looking for the
spill-response workers, Alyeska created sham emergency teams, listing names
of oil terminal employees who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill
equipment, which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on
paper. When the Exxon Valdez grounded, there was no native spill crew, only
chaos.

The Fable of the Drunken Skipper has served the oil industry well. It
transforms the most destructive oil spill in history into a tale of human
frailty, a terrible, but onetime, accident. But broken radar, missing
equipment, phantom spill personnel, faked tests – all of it to cut costs and
lift bottom lines – made the spill disaster not an accident but an
inevitability.

I went back to the Sound just before the tenth anniversary of the spill. On
Chenega, they were preparing to spend another summer scrubbing rocks. A
decade after the spill, in one season, they pulled twenty tons of sludge off
their beaches. At Nanwalek village ten years on, the state again declared
the clams inedible, poisoned by "persistent hydrocarbons." Salmon still
carry abscesses and tumors, the herring never returned and the sea lion
rookery at Montague Island remains silent and empty.

But despite what my eyes see, I must have it wrong, because right here in an
Exxon brochure it says, "The water is clean and plant, animal and sea life
are healthy and abundant."

Go to the Sound today, on Chugach land, kick over a rock and you’ll get a
whiff of an Exxon gas station.

The final injustice
Everyone’s heard of the big jury verdict against Exxon: a $5 billion award.
What you haven’t heard is that ExxonMobil hasn’t paid a dime of it. It’s
been a decade since the trial. BP painted itself green and ExxonMobil
decided to paint the White House with green: It’s the number-two lifetime
donor to George W. Bush’s career (after Enron), with a little splashed the
Democrats’ way. The oil industry’s legal stalls, the "tort reform" campaigns
and the generous investment in our democratic process has produced a Supreme
Court and appeals panels that look more like luncheon clubs of corporate
consiglieri than panels of defenders of justice. In November 2001, following
directives of the Supremes, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned
the jury verdict on grounds the punishment was too dear and severe for poor
little ExxonMobil.

The BP-led Alyeska consortium was able to settle all claims for 2 percent of
the acknowledged damage, roughly a $50 million payout, fully covered by an
insurance fund.

And the natives? While waiting for Exxon to make good on promises of
compensation, Chief Agnes and Paul Kompkoff have passed away. As to my
four-volume summary of evidence of frauds committed against the natives: In
1991, when herring failed to appear and fishing in the Sound collapsed, the
tribal corporation went bankrupt and my files became, effectively, useless.

Greg Palast is the author of The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Constable and
Robinson), from where this article is taken.



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