WASHINGTON – A little after midnight on May 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez struck a reef in Prince William Sound, Alaska. An estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled from the 978-foot oil tanker, wreaking devastation on wildlife and residents along 350 miles of shoreline.
More than two decades later, an offshore oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers and injured 17 others. Thousands of jobs were lost as oil leaked for months; the environmental impact was massive and is still being assessed. The BP spill escalated public distrust of the oil industry and the government, which was seen as slow to respond.
Both events brought about government action in their wake, largely because of public outcry. In the former instance, critics complained that the government did too little; this time, some critics complain that it did too much, resulting in a lack of consistency, particularly with regard to moratoriums instituted on offshore drilling.
Recently, the Obama administration declared a new moratorium on drilling off the Atlantic coast and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico near Florida, citing safety concerns. This came following Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar’s decision to lift a six-month deep-water drilling moratorium in the Gulf, begun at the end of May.
“It’s all political — none of it will help the people,” said Rory Cooper, a former senior policy adviser at the Department of Energy and director of strategic communications at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “The Obama administration, from the beginning, never had any advisers with an energy background telling them an appropriate response to the oil spill.”
The newest moratorium is expected to last at least until 2017, and will suspend action on 33 exploratory drilling operations in the Gulf. It also affects pending lease sales and drilling off the Virginia coast and in the Arctic.
Some see the new moratorium as reflecting a shift in national policy, an impression that elicits two differing responses.
“I think it’s the administration hitting the reset button on offshore drilling expansion,” said Elgie Holstein, senior director for strategic planning in the Environmental Defense Fund’s Land, Water & Wildlife program. Holstein, a former senior adviser to Obama’s presidential campaign on energy and environmental policy, believes the move indicates a push for alternative energy sources, and said the administration’s economists are convinced that building a more sustainable and greener energy future will jump-start new industries and spur job creation.
A case in point: Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently said that China’s success creating innovative and clean energy industries means that the United States must do so in order to compete on the world front for jobs.
But this apparent push, according to Cooper, is not good news. “What they’re trying to do is to make it so hard to produce oil domestically that we have no alternative choice [but renewable energy],” he said. “Instead of a rational, balanced approach that protects the environment and the local economy, we got a haphazard approach that hurts both the environment and the local economy.”
Two decades ago, the chorus of complaints sounded a different set of notes, unrelated to national policy. The Exxon Valdez disaster showed a failure on the part of government to do enough for residents, according to Duane Gill, who is on a research team investigating that spill’s impact on people. “The main point of contention for me is that both the state and federal government settled [damage claims] early,” said Gill, who is also the head of the department of sociology at Oklahoma State University. “They went ahead and settled with Exxon and left the citizens in their class-action lawsuit to pursue their own damage awards.”
The $1 billion government settlement of 1991 was criticized because it was primarily used to restore damaged ecosystems, without provisions to restore damaged communities or the lives of the people who lived and worked in Alaska.
Residents went to court themselves. After nearly 20 years of back-and-forth, 33,000 plaintiffs were awarded, in June 2008, an estimated $500 million dollars in punitive damages. That works out to approximately $15,000 per person,
Immediately after the BP spill, the government held the company responsible for all financial obligations and BP created a $20 billion emergency assistance fund. The administration brought in Kenneth Feinberg, who also headed the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, to handle this one. Approximately 450,000 people have applied, and in late November final settlements began to be disbursed. According to the BP Gulf Response website, approximately $2.2 billion has already been paid to date to more than 150,000 individuals and businesses.
BP also invested $500 million in the Gulf Research Institute, which will assess the impact of the disaster on the environment and public health in the Gulf.
However, not everyone is happy with the process. A major point of contention is the complicated and onerous application. Potentially even more frustrating is the time lag in receiving payment because some applications lack proper documentation; without this documentation, claims can be rejected. Victims also have to waive their rights to sue if they accept a settlement.
Though one disaster showed a lack of government intervention and the other showed much more of it, it seems that the people affected suffer regardless.
“Some data we’ve collected indicate that levels of psychological stress in communities affected by the BP oil spill are just as high as they were in communities after the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” Gill said. “If people aren’t treated fairly and justly for their damages in the BP spill, I would anticipate a continued level of stress. The precedent is [already] there for any corporation to drag out the litigation.”