N.Y. sues Exxon over oil spill
Residents angered by slow cleanup
The Associated Press
NEW YORK - New York's attorney general told Exxon Mobil and two other oil companies Thursday he intends to sue them for taking decades to clean up a giant, underground pond of petroleum left by the refineries that once lined Brooklyn's waterfront.
Hidden beneath 50 acres of homes and businesses, the subterranean slick is believed to have been floating on top of the water table in the borough's Greenpoint section for at least half a century.
Exxon, the world's biggest publicly traded oil company, had accepted responsibility for much of the spill in 1990 and constructed a pumping system that has gradually extracted 9.3 million gallons of oil from the ground.
The pace of the cleanup, though, has infuriated residents and local officials. Environmental groups have also clamored for more action to stop the inky blob from draining into Newtown Creek, an industrialized waterway that separates Brooklyn from Queens.
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said his office has begun serving formal notice to Exxon Mobil and others of the state's intent to sue under the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
"This is one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation, larger than the Exxon Valdez and slower in the cleanup. Exxon Mobil must and will be held accountable," Cuomo said in a written statement. He accused the company of leaving a "toxic footprint," then doing "as little as possible to address the dangers that it created."
Other defendants will include the oil companies Chevron and BP, which owned facilities believed to have contributed to the pollution. The state also filed notice Thursday that it will sue two other companies for contamination in the creek: Keyspan, which is responsible for a defunct manufactured gas plant, and Phelps Dodge, which operated a now-demolished copper smelting plant.
Exxon has said for years that it is committed to the cleanup, but the delicate nature of the oil recovery operation makes it difficult to extract the material any faster.
"We are remediating the site. We take our environmental responsibility very seriously and we are very committed to cleaning up the site," said company spokeswoman Prem Nair.
The state had been threatening legal action since the spring, when officials at the Department of Environmental Conservation said they had failed to persuade Exxon to implement a better cleanup system voluntarily.
News of the impending suit was celebrated by the environmentalist group Riverkeeper, which has campaigned for years for tougher state action.
"Exxon Mobil's days of treating Greenpoint like a dumping ground are numbered," said Alex Matthiessen, the organization's president.
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