And now they won't have to.
The Supreme Court today cut Exxon's liability by 90% to half a billion.
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 its 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 commitments 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."
[Thursday, June 26, 2008] Twenty years after Exxon Valdez slimed over one thousand miles of Alaskan beaches, the company has yet to pay the $5 billion in punitive damages awarded by the jury. 
