STICK YOUR DAMN
HAND IN IT
20th Birthday of the Exxon Valdez Lie
By Greg Palast
[March 23, 2009]: "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.
Native dancers, Nanwalek, Prince William Sound, Alaska,
center of spill damage
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.
Oil still being cleaned up seven years after the spill
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.
Investigator Palast flies over Exxon Valdez spill site
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.
Alaska Native Henry Makarka: "If I had a machine gun, I
kill those white sons-of-bitches."
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 fishermen
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 we're 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.
Check out the YouTube clip of Greg Palast on Air
America's 'Ring of Fire' with Mike Papantonio on the Exxon Valdez and
on the death of investigative reporting in America. Listen in this
weekend on your Air America station.
And get ready: on Friday, March 27, the launch of
GREG PALAST INVESTIGATES - On the Trail with investigative reporter
Palast - with three of his latest ass-kicking BBC Television reports.
Palast is looking for co-producers for the film's
DVD release. Support the team behind the work that the Chicago Tribune
calls, "Stories so relevant, they threaten to alter history." Pre-order
the DVD today.
Palast is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation
Writing Fellow for investigative reporting.]
Alaska photos by James Macalpine for the Palast
Investigative Fund, a 501c3 not-for-profit educational foundation.]