Breathless in Brooklyn: Oil Spills in Our BackyardCommentary: When they found one of the world's largest oil spills beneath New York City, state, federal, and oil company officials did the only logical thing: They passed the buck.
By Frank Koughan (Mother Jones Magazine)
Basil Seggos leans against the rail of a 36-foot harbor patrol boat as it chugs along Newtown Creek into an industrial wasteland of sewer pipes and flotsam, past a huge conveyor belt carrying skeletal cars to the scrap heap and a natural gas facility belching plumes of orange flame. A gentle headwind conveys the odors one at a time: salt, sewage, sulfur, and then the powerful stench of petroleum.
"You can really smell it before you can see it," Seggos, the chief investigator for the environmental watchdog Riverkeeper, says, pointing to a black metal bulkhead along the south bank. The boat draws closer, and a purple sheen appears on the surface. "That's all oil," he says. It's the bleeding edge of an environmental disaster, one of the largest oil spills in the world.
The discharge floating on this inland waterway, which divides the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, is just a hint at what lies beneath—anywhere between 17 million and 30 million gallons' worth, a spill more than 50 percent larger than the Exxon Valdez. But unlike the Exxon Valdez, this one has been allowed to grow and fester for half a century, directly below a residential area. Even in the neighborhood—an old-time blue-collar community pocked with hipster enclaves—many people don't know why the air smells like gasoline on rainy days.
"This is a working-class community with a dirty creek in a part of Brooklyn no one really cares about," Seggos says. "It would have perhaps been a better thing if these were river otters covered with oil. You'd have had immediate action."
No one's really sure how long the oil has been there, but most people point to a massive explosion that ripped through the city's sewer system in 1950, raining manhole covers down on the populace. City officials blamed gasoline leaking from what was then Mobil's Brooklyn refinery. Mobil denied it. That was pretty much the extent of the investigation, and for a couple of decades the oil quietly continued to drip into the soil and groundwater under the refinery, spreading beneath the neighborhood and oozing—a tenth of an inch every hour—toward the bank of Newtown Creek.
In 1978, a Coast Guard helicopter spotted an oil slick on the creek. Investigating further, the Guard discovered the 55-acre monster that had by then massed beneath the city. Chemical analysis fingered Mobil as the source, and again the company said it wasn't at fault. By now, Mobil had sold part of the refinery to Amoco and was using the rest for storage tanks. A few blocks away, a Texaco subsidiary also had a storage facility. The companies (now known as ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron, respectively) pointed fingers at each other; government agencies, sensing that this was not a rumble they wanted to be involved in, did the same.
The Coast Guard, having spent half a million dollars investigating the spill, decided it had done enough; the case was turned over to the state of New York, which wanted no part of it either. Believing that the spill, while regrettable, posed no immediate hazard (no one drank the groundwater anymore, and the manhole-launching explosions had long ago subsided), officials decided not to apply their recently established oil spill fund to what was by far the state's largest oil spill, on the grounds that the spill predated the fund. So the buck was handed down to New York City—which, still reeling from its financial near-meltdown in the 1970s, chose not to do battle with a brace of oil company lawyers. For a decade, nothing happened. And the oil lake quietly grew.
"You become something of a stink connoisseur when you live in Greenpoint," says Teresa Toro, who lives two blocks from Newtown Creek. The neighborhood features rows of meticulously kept houses, manicured parks, and cafés catering to an influx of ex-Manhattanites, but it also remains the location of choice for projects that would never be placed along Fifth Avenue: sewage treatment, waste transfer, natural gas storage. For Toro, the oil fumes are the worst. "When the wind is just right, I can smell it blowing off the creek. Sometimes we can't open our windows.
"The [sewage treatment] plant people get very defensive when you call up and complain about the smell," Toro laughs. "They say, 'That's not us! It's the spill!'" But then she turns serious. "Every time I go to the creek, I just get so angry," she says. "I feel like I'm watching a crime in progress."
Local lore holds that it was the Valdez crash that finally shamed the state into action in 1990. "Not at all," says Joseph Lentol, the neighborhood's state assemblyman since 1972. The truth, he says, is worse: In 1988, Mobil had another leak—35,000 gallons—and felt the need to notify the city that, by the way, there happened to be 17 million gallons more underneath. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation began negotiating a consent order forcing Mobil to clean up its mess.
The deal, in the end, required no monetary damages, set no firm benchmarks for progress, and demanded removal of the oil floating on top of the groundwater but not of the contaminated soil. It also gave Mobil a powerful tool for staving off litigation—the company was, after all, complying with a government-mandated cleanup. "A consent decree is nothing more than another word for a plea bargain," says Lentol. "It was a slap on the wrist."
As time wore on, the people of Greenpoint would come to revile the environment department as much as, if not more than, the oil company itself. At least they weren't paying Mobil executives' salaries. A spokeswoman for the department, Maureen Wren, says the consent decree should be viewed in light of "the information available at that time" and that the state has always been committed to holding the company responsible. But by the time another decade had gone by, ExxonMobil and the other oil companies had removed less than 8 million gallons. There was no reason for them to pick up the pace. Until Riverkeeper showed up.
"We found out about it by stumbling across it, literally," Seggos says, recalling how he noticed the sheen on the water one day in 2002, while floating along Newtown Creek to educate immigrants about the dangers of fishing there. He assigned an intern to look into it and was soon presented with a fantastic-sounding story about a 17-million-gallon-plus underground lake of oil. "I said, 'You idiot! What the hell are you talking about? Go back and do more research!'" After almost another year of investigation, Seggos approached the state to see if Riverkeeper—a small, 41-year-old environmental group whose top attorney is Robert Kennedy Jr.—could help apply pressure on ExxonMobil. "They totally blew us off," he says.
In 2004, Riverkeeper notified the environment department that it planned to sue ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron on behalf of a half-dozen local residents (including Teresa Toro). The suit sought no damages, only a proper cleanup. But behind the scenes, Seggos had begun laying the groundwork for a major toxic tort suit, facilitating a series of sometimes-awkward meetings between out-of-town trial lawyers and reticent locals. "It's a very difficult community to penetrate," he says.
That got a lot easier in the summer of 2005, when results of vapor tests Seggos had commissioned came back showing dangerous levels of explosive methane gas and benzene, a carcinogen. The neighborhood erupted as if the oil itself had been set ablaze. People who had long believed the spill to be merely a foul-smelling nuisance now began tallying the community's sick and its dead.
"It's up to
35 or 36 people that I know that have had cancer just on this block," says Tom Stagg, a retired detective who's lived near the spill his whole life. Sitting at his kitchen table, he rattles off the list: his mother, father, stepfather, his neighbor's wife, a friend of his daughter's, his pal Joey, a nine-year-old kid a couple streets over. "It's too many," he says. "Too many people."
Jane Pedota lives directly above the spill. A couple of her neighbors, she says, have exactly the same pancreatic problems; another neighbor has died of a brain tumor, and his wife died of myelofibrosis, a cancer linked to benzene. "I'm telling you, you're seeing odd things," Pedota says. "Too coincidental for me."
By the end of the year, the lawyers Seggos had brought in, Girardi & Keese—of Erin Brockovich fame—filed suit against the oil companies. Stagg and Pedota signed on. Brockovich herself showed up to rally the residents.
By the time the environment department convened a public meeting last year, the neighborhood had built up a full head of steam. Hundreds packed the Princess Manor banquet hall to hear presentations by ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron, hectoring company representatives with catcalls of "liar!" and "shame on you people!" A health department spokesman tried to reassure the crowd, saying the
state was unaware of any health threat but acknowledging that no studies had been done and none were planned. When state officials announced the cleanup would last another 20 years or more, the room fell silent.
That April, Riverkeeper obtained internal ExxonMobil documents showing that the company had known of high levels of benzene and other chemicals a decade earlier, when the substances were detected in a commercial property just 1,000 feet from the Pedota household. (ExxonMobil spokesman Brian Dunphy told Mother Jones that the tests, which were not conducted by the company, aren't proof of a health threat.)
The pressure continued to build until June 2006, when the talks between the environment department and ExxonMobil imploded (neither side will say why), whereupon the state finally referred the case to then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. Days later, Congress approved funding for a full epa study of the spill, the federal government's first involvement in the case since the Coast Guard sailed away in 1979.
In February, Spitzer's successor, Andrew Cuomo, announced that his office intended to sue ExxonMobil (he filed the suit in July) to force a speedy cleanup. But the threat of litigation seemed to have the opposite effect. ExxonMobil shut down its groundwater pumps, which had been sucking up oil at a rate of 1,110 gallons per day, slowing the cleanup to a near halt. At the direction of the environment department, the company restarted the pumps this summer; the various lawsuits facing ExxonMobil remain ongoing. "I told my kids, 'This won't be settled until I'm dead and gone,'" says Pedota—who, like everyone else on her block, flies the Stars and Stripes in front of her house all year long. "But it would be nice to see that you could raise your children here." As she spoke, the oil beneath her home continued to creep, a tenth of an inch per hour, toward the creek.
Comments:
Do you own a car?
Posted by:Ames Tiedeman onSeptember 14, 2007 1:34:05 PM
Slick smear campaign No one in the media seems to report the fact that more than half of the 17 million gallon spill has already been cleaned up. Also, the remediation process has been going on, with the blessing of local elected officials, since 1992 and continues. Also interesting is that no one points out that the spill is almost entirely under the remote western industrial section of Greenpoint near the East Williamsburg industrial park. There are a few residential streets near Kingsland Avenue that are above the spill, but the vast majority of residential properties are not involved with the spill. A vapor study has been completed by the NYS Dept. of Health which concluded that there were no vapors coming from the spill into homes. There were also no vapors found in the air in the community.
http://neighborhoodroots.tripod.com/vaporstudy.html The smear campaign has included news reports by Marcia Kramer of CBS news and Geraldo Rivera of FOX news first reporting on a cancer victim who lost his leg at age 14. The reports falsely linked this cancer survivor with Greenpoint in an attempt to create a scare about a 30 year old oil spill story. The cancer victim was actually a life long Williamsburg resident, named Sebastian Pirrozi, who now resides in Staten Island. Mr. Pirrozi had never lived in Greenpoint, but it is true is that there were three cases of extremely rare cancer on Devoe Street, the block in Williamsburg where he lived.
In fact, one victim got cancer after residing in the same apartment as Mr. Pirrozi. One more case is five blocks away and even further away from Greenpoint towards Grand Street. The Sebastian Pirrozi story was also covered by the NY Post (also owned by FOX News Corp) and published on October 15, 2006. When the Post reporter, Angela Montefinise, was contacted about the facts in her story, she said that her editor, Susan Edelman, had rewritten her story before it was put in the paper. She said that she was aware that Mr. Pirrozi never lived in Greenpoint, and that her original unpublished article pointed out the fact that it seemed that there were people who were trying to attach themselves to the old oil spill story to make some money with unscrupulous “ambulance chaser” attorneys.
She didn’t understand why her editor reworked her article and misrepresented where the cancer cluster was. She was unhappy that her name was attached to the article. Congressman Anthony Weiner who has been in the forefront of this smear campaign stated that Greenpoint has a 25% higher asthma rate than the rest of the city. The only problem is that the two health studies done by the state and city show the asthma rate in Greenpoint to be between 25% and 50% LOWER than the rest of the city along with a 10% LOWER cancer rate.
Where are they higher? You guessed it- Williamsburg. The State DEC is aware of toxic industrial sites in Willliamsburg near Devoe Street that could potentially be the cause of these rare cancers, but no one is calling for that study. “Instead, there seems to be a no holds barred attack on Greenpoint and a blatant disregard for the health concerns of the Willamsburg community”, One has to wonder
Congressman Weiner are in the pocket of Williamsburg real estate developers trying to cover up a serious health concern that may hinder the sales of their luxury condo developments. “Public officials are to serve and protect life and property- not serve and protect property of their cronies.”
One must question whether the recent support of massive residential development in Williamsburg and the historic resistance from Brooklyn politicians (including Borough President
Marty Markowitz and Congresswoman Nydia Velasquez) to residential development along the recently rezoned Greenpoint waterfront has anything to do with this dissemination of lies. http://www.nyhealth.gov/statistics/ cancer/registry/pdf/volume1nycneighborhoods.pdf
Lets do a Greenpoint vs Williamsburg toxic score card. Liquid Natural Gas storage facilities in Williamsburg: Yes, in East Williamsburg Liquid Natural Gas storage facilities in Greenpoint: none Radioactive storage facilities in Williamsburg: Radiac on Kent Ave Radioactive storage facilities in Greenpoint: none Williamsburg oil spill size: Unknown (it might be even bigger than the Exxon Valdez) The Astral oil company operated on the Williamsburg waterfront for decades and may have spilled over 100 million gallons of oil into the ground under Williamsburg contaminating ground water and creating toxic vapors.
Williamsburg’s higher cancer rates may now be better understood. How many new residents know about the potential deadly health risks that this oil poses? Greenpoint oil spill size: defined and now half its original size. Williamsburg oil spill location: Under newly developed luxury condos and possibly under the majority of the developing community. The full devastating results can only be determined by a lengthy study.
Greenpoint oil spill location: Under the remote industrial property next to the East Williamsburg industrial park. Greenpoint condos being built on former toxic brownfields: none Williamsburg condos being built on toxic brownfields: Many (including the Eastern District Site, and now the Williamsburg Oil field site) Blogs revealing the toxic hazards in Williamsburg: Hard to find Blogs dedicated to spreading lies about toxic hazards in Greenpoint: You can hardly swing a stick without hitting one.
All of Greenpoint less desirable industries of the past were located in the eastern industrial section along the Newtown creek. Greenpoint’s East river waterfront had been home to lumberyards, rope factories for a century and then was abandoned for nearly half a century. None of Greenpoint’s East River waterfront has the toxic history that Williamsburg’s Eastern district terminal has. The smear campaign unleashed on Greenpoint, just when we it was rezoned curiously excluded Williamsburg’s toxic issues.
The media still isn’t covering the issues, just day after day coverage of hipsterville. Do a williamsburg search in the NY times. It’s pretty revealing. Luis Garden Acosta, Founder/President & CEO of El Puente, a highly respected community human rights institution that promotes leadership for peace and justice through the engagement of members (youth and adult) in the arts, education, scientific research, wellness and environmental action has called Williamsburg “the most toxic place to live in America” in a documentary created by Williamsburg based VBS organization. Other rare cancer clusters in Willamsburg have been reported.
Posted by:Greenpoint Archive onSeptember 14, 2007 8:15:57 PM
This is a moral outrage. Exxon's feet need to be held to the fire.
Posted by:Debbie onSeptember 15, 2007 6:28:12 AM
If only there were such a thing as divine retribution.
Posted by:JLE onSeptember 15, 2007 8:35:45 AM
What does "Do you own a car?" mean. Is it some idiotic attempt to excuse the oil companies from their responsibilities for the pollution they have caused worldwide? How about the corrupt governments they have been in bed with the last 60 or 70 years that have finnaly caused the people in these countries to rise up and support groups like Al Queda. Is the person who posted this rediculous question employed by these oil companies, Halliburton, or the Bush Administration? What a dork.
Posted by:confused onSeptember 15, 2007 12:44:28 PM
This is not a problem, but an opportunity. Let us recover the oil and recycle it.
Posted by:Joyce onSeptember 15, 2007 1:57:37 PM
Greenpoint Archive visits any website that writes about this incredibly huge oil spill. They repost nearly identical text at each site. Google "Greenpoint Archive" Why would a resident in the area of such a spill be engaged in a fervent web-campaign to prevent the smearing of an oil company? hmmmm Wonderful piece Frank.
Posted by:n8nyc onSeptember 16, 2007 9:18:00 AM
The facts are not to protect the oil company. The facts are to protect the reputation of a community. One has to question why so many false statements have been made about the community. This all began just after we won a hard fought battle to have our East River waterfront rezoned for residential development against the wished of the Brooklyn politicians who interests are in keeping property values up in more remote locations in Brooklyn like Red Hook, Park Slope, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens.
The funny thing is that they dragged out this 50 year old oil story to smear the community. Every point made is factual and verifiable. Greenpoint certainly wants even it's industrial section cleaned up, but does not appreciate the lies being printed about this wonderful neighborhood. If Mother Jones bothered to read the EPA report instead if letting dishonest politicians like Congressman Anthony Weiner feed them their facts, I think the article would have been more about corrupt politics and less about bogus claims directed at Greenpoint.
Posted by:Greenpoint Archive onSeptember 16, 2007 10:02:54 AM
Excuse the typos on the previous post. The facts are not to protect the oil company. The facts are to protect the reputation of a community. One has to question why so many false statements have been made about the community.
This all began just after we won a hard fought battle to have our East River waterfront rezoned for residential development against the wishes of the Brooklyn politicians whose interests are in keeping property values up in more remote locations in Brooklyn like Red Hook, Park Slope, Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens where they and their cronies have invested millions. Oh yeah, it makes perfect sense to build a Whole Foods Market on a toxic waste site along the Gowanus Canal or a luxury condo on top of an oil plume on Roebling Street in Williamsburg. Wake up. The funny thing is that they dragged out this 50 year old oil story to smear the community. Every point I have made to protect this community is factual and verifiable. Greenpoint certainly wants even it's industrial section cleaned up, but does not appreciate the lies being printed about this wonderful neighborhood.
If Mother Jones bothered to read the EPA report instead if letting dishonest politicians like Congressman Anthony Weiner feed them their facts, I think the article would have been more about corrupt politics and less about bogus claims directed at Greenpoint.
Posted by:Greenpoint Archive onSeptember 16, 2007 10:25:37 AM
Greenpoint Archive - I trust you have evidence to back up the claim that the information in the story was "fed" to them by Rep Weiner? We all look forward to seeing it. But when you refer to "the EPA report" - do you mean the one that came out weeks after MoJo went to press, which says that the spill could be as large as 30 million gallons? Because, you're right, I bet Mojo wishes they had an advance copy of that.
Posted by:Laura onSeptember 16, 2007 2:26:27 PM
THE BLUE MARBLE BLOG-->
Brooklyn Oil Spill Now Dwarfs the Exxon ValdezSeptember 14, 2007 2:10 PMThe EPA just released a report saying that the Brooklyn oil spill Frank Koughan writes about in our current issue may be as extensive as 30 million gallons, not the 17 million gallons previously estimated. If so, that would make the spill nearly three times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. Yes, three times as much oil, stewing under Brooklyn....
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