Word: oil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What happened to the other 199,000 bbl.? Exxon professes not to know, a curious stance for a company that in other circumstances makes a corporate fetish out of accounting for every last barrel in its inventory. "I'm not going to speculate how much oil is left and where it is," says Sexton. As much as 25% of the crude may have evaporated in the early days after the spill. Much of the rest, guesses Lars Foyn, a fishery expert with the Marine Research Institute in Bergen, Norway, has become diluted in the water and disappeared. Most...
Alaska, meanwhile, has sued Exxon and the other oil companies that operate in the state for as yet unspecified damages. In a campaign of harassment (financed almost entirely from cleanup funds provided by Exxon), state officials manage to find fault at every turn. Says Steve Provant, a state cleanup coordinator: "I don't think any of the beaches are clean." Recently the state withheld approval for Exxon to use a floating incinerator it had brought to Alaska at a cost of $5 million after initially telling the company that burning was the preferred method of waste disposal...
...state has repeatedly criticized Exxon for failing to contain the oil in the days after it was spilled. But officials are less eager to admit that the state did almost nothing to make sure that the oil industry was prepared for a major accident. Over the past ten years, the staff of the state's oil- pollution-control management program was reduced from three people to one. Says Paul O'Brien, who ran the program until one month before the spill: "There weren't enough resources to do the job right. I was stretched pretty thin." After the accident, environment...
...retrospect, it is clear that the state should have used more of its oil income (an estimated $2 billion a year) to regulate the industry more tightly. Instead, the oil money has flowed into entitlement programs, which pay all Alaska residents an annual stipend of some $800 and senior citizens an additional guaranteed income of $250 a month. Even today Alaska officials bristle at the suggestion that residents who benefit from oil shipments should be made to share some of the burden of safeguarding them...
...Alaska tragedy shows that no amount of money and finger pointing can compensate for a disaster on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill. Once the oil got away, there was no way to clean it all up. Alaskans can only hope that the cleansing storms of winter will continue the scrubbing that Exxon merely started...