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PsychoCorp #2—You Thought You Knew What Happened in the Exxon Valdez "Accident"?

by Heidi Stevenson

It's been 20 years since the Exxon Valdez disaster. You thought you knew how it happened. A drunken captain steered the ship aground. This dereliction of duty led to the worst pollution disaster in history. It's a myth, carefully promulgated by Exxon and corporate minions, the press. This particular disaster can be laid at the feet of Exxon—and, by the way, a carefully ignored slurry spill by King Coal was 30 times worse, according to the EPA. We'll grant their Psycho Corporation award later. In honor of the 20th anniversary of the Valdez disaster, this one goes to Exxon. They showed others how to create disasters and evade responsibility.

What really happened? It's true that the captain was drunk, but he wasn't steering the ship. He'd gone to bed to sleep it off, handed the wheel to the third mate.

That may sound bad, but the fact is that it wouldn't have made any difference who was at the helm. Exxon had refused to fix the radar system. It hadn't worked since the Valdez's maiden voyage! It didn't make any difference who was at the ship's helm; he was going to be steering blind.

This isn't the end of Exxon's malfeasance. There's a simple way, required by law, to quickly contain a sea oil spill before it can do significant damage. A simple rubber skirt, called a boom, can quickly be placed around the spill and machinery can suck it up. Exxon claimed to have provided it, but that proved to be a lie. They had promised to have it near the Bligh Reef native village. It wasn't there.

Researcher and reporter, Greg Palast, has uncovered memos of a meeting by company executives of Exxon, ARCO, and British Petroleum in April 1988, 10 months before the spill. Exxon's top execs had been warned by its own vice president of Alaska shipping operations, T. L. Polasek, that they were legally required to supply equipment to contain spills. He had further told them that it wouldn't be possible to contain a spill in the Prince William sound without such equipment.

In that meeting, ARCO suggested that they—the oil companies—provide such equipment. Exxon vetoed it.

According to Palast,

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.

So, the Alaskan locals watched as the spill overwhelmed their sound and island. An elder, Henry Makarka, said he saw an otter rip his own eyes out because of the residue's burning. Palast quotes him as saying, "If I had a machine gun, I'd shoot every one of those white sons-of-bitches."

Exxon promised to pay for the losses. Then, they went about creating delays and obstructions to avoid doing just that. Palast offers examples of the results:

• The Nanwalek Chief of Natives' went bankrupt.
• The people of the Nanwalek village descended into alcoholism.
• Blaming Exxon in his note, the Cordova fishing port mayor committed suicide.
• In the village of Chenega, Paul Kompkoff was hungy because his lifelong food of seal meat, razor clams, salmon, and deer died, either directly from the oil's contamination or from eating food poisoned by it.

Exxon's president, Lee Raymond held a photo op promising to compensate the natives and to clean the beaches. At it, local Paul Kompkoff told him of hunger resulting from the spill. In response, Exxon sent cans of seal meat that had been marked, "Not Fit for Human Consumption". Kompkoff called it "zoo food". Besides, what they needed and wanted was replacement of their lost boats, so they could provide their own food.

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Palast states, "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."

That's exactly what they did. The company is, for all intents and purposes, immortal. People are not. Corporations can outlast people in courts. They can afford the attorneys, court fees, research, and even buy so-called experts. People cannot. Paul Kompkoff is now dead. His life, along with the lives of so many others, was destroyed and utterly consumed by Exxon's rampage in their pristine environment and then in the courts.

But wait a minute! What of the court's award! It was in the papers. Exxon was ordered to pay the villagers $5 billion. That's true, but then a Bush-stacked Supreme Court cut the award to 10% of that, to $500 million—to be split among 30,000 people. That's $16,666 per person. Imagine trying to recover a destroyed life with that. How would you bring your dead relatives back to life?

Even that's not the end of the story. Did you think that Exxon really cleaned the spill? There was much news reporting about it, but 20 years on, to anyone who cares to look, the story continues.

After Exxon announced that the spill had been cleaned up by Mother Nature two years after it happened, that was the end of it for the press. Isn't nature wonderful? No matter how bad the mess, Gaia can clean and heal it. The press said it was cleaned up, so it must have been. But it wasn't. On the surface, it looked good. Two inches underneath, though, it was as gooey and black as ever.

It's still there. As Palast wrote after seeing a native Alaskan stick her hand under the surface of the rocks:

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.

The president of Exxon during all of this, Lee Raymond, retired in 2006 with a $400 million bonus. Every penny was coined on the bodies of human lives, animal carcasses, and Gaia.

If decency and morality have nothing to do with it—and clearly that's the case—then Lee Raymond "earned" that bonus, not to mention the millions he was paid in the years before his retirement.

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