11645
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain
URL: https://www.gregpalast.com/dont-buy-exxons-fable-of-the-drunken-captain-2/
|
Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain by Greg Palastfor The Guardian UKMarch 24, 2021 Today, March 24, the 32nd Anniversary of the Exxon Valdez disaster will be commemorated with the re-telling of lies. The official story is, “Drunken Skipper Hits Reef.” Don’t believe it. Days after the oil tanker slimed 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coastline, I was in Prince William Sound, launching an investigation for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. It was their coastline. This story remains untold: the true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giant’s breaking their promises to the Natives and Congress, cynically and disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill. As to Captain Joe Hazelwood, he was below decks, sleeping off his bender. At the helm, the third mate would never have collided with Bligh Reef had he looked at his Raycas radar. But the radar was not turned on. In fact, the tanker’s radar was left broken and disabled for more than a year before the disaster, and Exxon management knew it. It was just too expensive to fix and operate. For the Chugach, this discovery was poignantly ironic. Twenty years earlier the Chugach sold Exxon and BP the incredibly valuable port of Valdez—for $1. That’s right, a dollar. But they won something in return: a guarantee of the safety of the waters on which they survived. On their list of safety demands in return for Valdez was “state-of-the-art” on-ship radar. We discovered more, but because of the labyrinthine ways of litigation, little became public, especially about the reckless acts of the industry consortium, Alyeska, which controls the Alaska Pipeline. Several smaller oil spills before the Exxon Valdez could have warned of a system breakdown. But Erlene Blake, a former Senior Lab Technician with Alyeska, the Exxon/BP consortium, told our investigators that management routinely ordered her to toss out test samples of water evidencing spilled oil. She was ordered to refill the test tubes with a bucket of clean sea water called, “The Miracle Barrel.” In a secret meeting in April 1988, Alyeska Vice-President T.L. Polasek confidentially warned the oil group executives that, because Alyeska had never purchased promised safety equipment, it was simply “not possible” to contain an oil spill past the Valdez Narrows — exactly where the Exxon Valdez ran aground 10 months later. The Natives demanded (and law requires) that the shippers maintain round-the-clock oil spill response teams. Alyeska hired the Natives, especially qualified by their generations-old knowledge of the Sound, for this emergency work. They trained to drop from helicopters into the water with special equipment to contain an oil slick at a moments notice. But in 1979, quietly, Alyeska fired them all. To deflect inquisitive state inspectors, the oil consortium created sham teams, listing names of oil terminal workers who had not the foggiest idea how to use spill equipment which, in any event, was missing, broken or existed only on paper. In 1989, when the oil poured from the tanker, there was no Native response team, only chaos. Today, three decades after the oil washed over the Chugach beaches, you can kick over a rock and it will smell like an old gas station. The Fable of the Drunken Captain serves the oil industry well. It falsely presents America’s greatest environmental disaster as a tale of human frailty, a one-time accident. But broken radar, missing equipment, phantom spill teams, faked tests — the profit-driven disregard of the law — made the spill an inevitability, not an accident. This article originally appeared in the Guardian UK on March 29,1999. The full untold story of the Exxon Valdez disaster can be found in Greg Palast’s book, Vultures’ Picnic. |
11646
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain
URL: https://www.gregpalast.com/my-home-is-now-a-strange-place/
|
The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe Vultures' Picnic: Chapter 7 by Greg PalastMarch 25, 2021 Days after the Exxon Valdez slimed 1,200 miles of Alaska’s coastline, I was in Prince William Sound, launching an investigation for the Chugach Natives of Alaska. It was their coastline. The true cause of the Exxon Valdez catastrophe was the oil giant’s breaking their promises to the Natives and Congress, cynically and disastrously, in the fifteen years leading up to the spill. The full extent of the oil company’s culpability, and the subsequent coverup, is chronicled in “My Home is Now a Strange Place” — Chapter 7 of my book, Vultures’ Picnic, excerpted here… Alaska, Before the Beginning Raven, that lying little bastard, came to Chenega Island, where the people slept and slept because there was only darkness. From His kayak, Raven gave them a box filled with Daylight, and in return, He demanded and they gave Him a wife, Qaleratalik, “Weasel in a Summer Dress.” He fed Qaleratalik only moss from His beak, which she could not eat. One day, when Raven was hungry, He told His grandchildren, “I have captured a huge seal just around the point.” And when His grandchildren left their fire to look, Raven ate all their food. They returned, and Raven, laughing, asked them if they found the seal although He knew that there was no seal. And so, His grandchildren died of disappointment. Uncounted millennia later, Russians arrived on Chenega Island. They told Chief Axuna about an Old Deceiver, Satan, who lives on this Earth; and Axuna, whose name meant “Cowardly Otter Anus,” was christened and re-named Makarichemovitsky, which means “Little Bird.” Then they took Little Bird’s furs and whale oil. The Orthodox priests in dark caftans christened another family, naming them Totemoff after the fancy sticks they worshipped, which the Russians burnt. Then, on Nuciiq Island, the priests baptized their cousins Kvasnikoff (“Whiskey- children”), kidnapped them, and abandoned them on the isolated end of an impenetrable glacier surrounded by the Gulf of Alaska. If the Whiskey-children didn’t die, Russia would gain a supply depot and whaling station conveniently located at the entrance to Prince William Sound. Axuna already knew all about the Old Deceiver; and Axuna knew Raven, the lying bastard, wasn’t what he pretended to be, that Raven used charcoal and sorcery to appear handsomely black. For a thousand years, the Chugachmiut warned each generation that underneath, Raven is white, ugly like ice. Mudqnò. That is all. There is no more. In 1867, Abraham Lincoln’s nasty little Secretary of State William Seward bought Alaska from the Imperial Czar for two and a half cents an acre. Of course, the Czar never actually owned it. Our young, troubled nation and Lincoln’s successor, who despised Seward and especially his “polar bear garden,” were happy to forget about Chenega village and the Chugachmiut Natives until Good Friday, 1964, two days too late to warn them . . . CHENEGA VILLAGE, PRINCE WILLIAM SOUND Natives of Chenega tell the story of how the ice peaks of Montague Island jumped twice a man’s height and just minutes later crashed back down. Good Friday, March 27, 1964. At 5:36 p.m., seismologists’ machines worldwide recorded a monster shake, 9.2 on the Richter scale, shimmying down Alaska’s coast. Tsunami waves big as battleships were sure to follow. Warnings went out to coastal towns from Anchorage down to Malibu. But no message was sent to the shortwave at the Chugach Native village of Chenega in Prince William Sound near the quake’s epicenter. Seal hunter Nicholas Kompkoff, Chenega’s chief, saw the ocean simply disappear in front of his stilt house. He knew right away the water had been sucked into a wave beyond the horizon and it would return with a vengeance. Kompkoff shepherded his four daughters up the gravel slope toward the church on the high ground, pushing them to run as fast as possible on little legs. But not fast enough. Just as the wave hit, Nicholas reached out, grabbed the two girls closest to him and ran with one under each arm. His two other daughters were seized by the water and dragged out into the frozen Sound. One came back. Days later, Nicholas found her body stuck in the high branches of a pine tree. Satellite telemetry indicates the Natives had way underestimated the mountain’s leap. The snow peaks of Montague Island rose thirty-three feet, then fell, sending a wave measuring eightynine feet seven inches over Chenega village. Nicholas’s younger brother, Don, told me he was lifted by the wave but managed to grab the cross at the top of the church steeple, holding on to his life there, the only verifiable instance in which Jesus saved. Two days after the quake, a postal plane flew over to drop the village’s mail out its window but could not find Chenega — because it wasn’t there. Of the dozens of stilt homes, every one of them was swept away — with a third of the residents still in them or fleeing. The pilot, Jimmy Firth, on a hunch and a second flyover, spotted a few wrecked pieces of the blue church roof. Nicholas and those of his people who survived were boarded onto a rescue boat, divided up, and dumped in Anchorage, on Tatitlek Island, and at the Eyak village in Cordova. Over the next few years, Nicholas became both a drunk and an Orthodox priest. In 1968, Father Nicholas put a gun under his chin and pulled the trigger. The bullet shattered his jaw but missed his brain. The church’s embarrassed bishops defrocked him. Still, each and every year on Good Friday, Nicholas and a few die-hard Chenegans would make the chilly pilgrimage by boat to the old village, to gather washed-up bones, leave one cross on the beach, and repeat an increasingly pathetic vow to return to the Sound and rebuild their homes. Do miracles happen? I like to think so. In March 1969, a helicopter descended from the heavens over Cordova, and a man from Humble Oil came looking for Father Nick with an offer to solve Chenega’s problems. The biggest problem of all was that Raven had given Chenegans the sun and moon but failed to give them a signed deed for the real estate. No one in the village had a piece of paper saying, “We own this.” Until they could get that piece of paper, Chenegans could not return. The Humble man would fix that, using the powers of his company in Washington to get them the title to their island homeland. The company with the gentle name of Humble was the Alaskan subsidiary of something far less humble, Standard Oil Company, which would rename itself Exxon Corporation three years later. “Mr. Humble” wanted only one thing in return from Nicholas: for him to sell Humble and its partners the old Chugach village of Valdez. Valdez is a sacred place for the oil industry. The shaky geology of Alaska (“tsunamigenic subducting continental plates”) made Valdez the only spot on the whole of the state’s 44,000-mile-long coast that could handle a mammoth oil tanker port. Therefore, the Valdez property was worth, say, a couple of billion or so. How much would the oil giants pay the Natives for Valdez? They offered Father Nicholas one dollar. * * * a bunch more at the link... |
Responses:
[11647]
11647
From: ryan, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Don’t Buy Exxon’s Fable Of The Drunken Captain
URL: https://www.gregpalast.com/the-oil-industry-floats-on-lies/
|
The Oil Industry Floats on Lies: The True Story of the Exxon Valdez by Greg Palast and Thom Hartmann for The Thom Hartmann Program. March 27, 2021 It wasn’t human error that caused America’s greatest environmental disaster, the Exxon Valdez catastrophe, it was inhuman corporate miserliness — the oil industry’s systemic fraud, corruption, and penny-pinching la-di-da view of safety. In this edition of The Thom Hartmann Program, Hartman and Palast discuss the Exxon Valdez on the 32 anniversary of the catastrophe. Thom Hartmann: 32 years ago today, the Exxon Valdez disaster happened. The myth that I think most of us believe, the story that was told — in fact a movie was made out of it — is that the captain of the ship was a drunk and therefore it ran aground… But there’s a much deeper story here and one of the guys who was on that story at the time, doing the research, publishing articles about it is the author of Vultures’ Picnic, which features the full Exxon Valdez story. It’s one of Greg Palast’s absolutely does books…Greg, welcome back to the program. Tell us the true story of the Exxon Valdez. Greg Palast: Yeah, let me declare that I was the chief investigator for the people that owned the shoreline, the Chugach Natives of Alaska. I lived up there with the natives. I was up there for a few years doing the investigation. Here’s the story: There’s this whole myth that there’s a drunken skipper, like someone at the wheel of a car who’s drunk and smashes into a rock. No, he was below deck sleeping it off. That’s not how that happened… Anyone could’ve taken that ship through there because they had the very first GPS system in the world on that ship. It was very easy to sail through and not hit a rock. There’s a big, giant light on Bligh Reef, they should have missed it. But, believe it or not, Exxon had the radar turned off — I kid you not. The radar was turned off. Why? Because it was broken. It was too expensive to fix. It’s not like your $200 Garmin. We’re talking a $2 million piece of equipment, which took a lot of people, millions of dollars of training. They turned off the radar. The other thing is that it hit at Bligh Reef at the Tatitlek village. You have to understand, the Chugach Natives, my clients who I was investigating for, they were standing on the beach, watching this ship come towards them and smash into the rocks. And here’s the tragedy. it destroyed their village, it destroyed 1200 miles of coastline, it destroyed their lives… They’d cut a deal, the Chugach Natives had given Exxon and BP the Port of Valdez — a billion dollar property — for $1. But they said, what we care about is not your money, we want these waters clean and safe. You put us in charge of the safety. Number one, you must have state-of-the-art radar. And they got Exxon to agree to it. And of course they turned off the radar… The second condition is that you have to have safety equipment at Bligh Reef in case oil spill. It’s very easy, by the way, to clean up an oil spill. It’s really simple. You put rubber boom around it and then you get a containment ship and you suck it out. So you put on the rubber on it and suck it out and you’re done — you would have never heard of the Exxon Valdez. Exxon lied and BP lied and said that there was spill equipment right there at Bligh Reef, right where the ship hit, but it was a complete lie. They signed a document. It was a fraud. And even worse, part of the deal for getting Valdez was that they hire the natives who were experts in being able to get into that icy water, with special suits on to surround a ship where there’s a spill. But kust before the tanker hit, they’d fired the natives to save money. They never put out the equipment. They fired the natives who were prepared and trained to surround a stricken vessel and stop the oil from flowing out, by pumping it out. You would have never heard of the Exxon Valdez except that Exxon and its partner British Petroleum lied and lied and lied — and that’s why we still know the name Exxon Valdez 33 years later. Hartmann: I think we also know the name of Joseph… Palast: Hazelwood. Look, if you’re a captain, you shouldn’t be drunk. But he wasn’t driving the car, he wasn’t driving the vessel. The problem was, Hartmann: Right, he was in the back seat. Palast: He was below decks, sleeping it off. So was the first and second mate, the third mate, he wasn’t exactly expert, but they had the radar. Any 12-year old who’s played a video game would know how to move that ship by following the GPS. That’s all you have to do. It’s a big, giant, wide channel. Hartmann: But if you’ve got no GPS, you’ve got a problem. Palast:vYeah. And, by the way, on top of everything else, while Exxon Mobil has run giant, full-page ads for several years about their safe vessels, because they have double hulls. Well, they didn’t. The Exxon Valdez had a single hull because Exxon and BP had successfully fought congressional demands to have every tanker out of Valdez have a double hull. They beat that, said it wasn’t necessary. When the tanker hit, if it had hit the reef and had the double hull, they wouldn’t have lost 12 ounces of oil let alone, you know, we don’t know how many gallons, but about 42 million gallons of oil. Named Book of the Year on BBC Newsnight Review, you can get a signed copy of Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores with a tax deductible donation to support our work. Vultures’ Picnic charts the course of Palast’s quest to bring the truth of the BP disaster to light as he and his team of journalist-detectives go from the streets of Baku, where Palast searches for a brown valise full of millions, to a small Eskimo village, where he hears firsthand of the depth of deceit and heartbreaking environmental devastation, to a burnt-out nuclear reactor in Japan, to Chevron’s operations in the Amazon jungle. Along the way, Palast and his team see the many other crimes perpetrated by the energy giants of the worlds, the banks that fund their lies, and the governments that turn a blind eye. Hartmann: Wow… What was the consequences of this to Exxon, other than bad publicity, which they seem to have been able to greenwash away? And what happened to your clients, the Native Americans there? Palast: Well, oh boy, I fought Exxon for years on their behalf with the legal team and we uncovered this massive fraud. And they said, if you make the fraud public, if you use the F-word — fraud — we will never give you a penny. So they gave the natives a few shekels. What they did was they basically bought the natives’ land. Why? Cause they actually wanted to use it for oil work staging. You can still go to the Chugach lands, like to Sleepy Bay, and if you stick your hand in the gravel at the beach at Sleepy Bay — I go about every 10 years — if you stick your hand in the gravel, it’ll come up with goo and smell like a gas station. This fantasy that nature is an endless toilet that flushes itself clean is nonsense. So they’ve still got the hydrocarbon. It killed their seals, it made their sardines that they live off inedible. I was at the Chenega village. They lived 100% off the land. Everything was poisoned. It destroyed their way of life. And a judge ruled that the native way of life, living off the land — which they have lived off for 3000 years — a judge said, look, your native life is just a lifestyle choice, you know, you could always just go to a supermarket (which is a hundred miles away by air). So they got nothing for the destruction of their way of life. It destroyed those villages. It destroyed those villages. It was horrendous, and it’s still there… And Exxon is still putting out the lie that nature cleans itself. Again, it’s just a toilet you can keep flushing. Because who goes up there? This is really remote. Hartmann: Is any of this still being litigated? Palast: No. By the way, Exxon told me when I tried to cut a deal with them, they said, you know, buddy, we can wait you out 20 years in a courtroom. And I thought, well, that’s an exaggeration. No, it was 20 years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled and cut out 90% of the jury and court judgment against Exxon — 90% of the court judgment! It was the case that virtually ended punitive damages in America. So I don’t think people understand what happens with these oil spills. It is permanent destruction and you’re finished. These guys lie. The oil industry floats on lies. |
Responses:
None