The Mystery of Newtown Creek - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 16

said. “No one was savvy enough to connect the chemicals to all the sickness. No one was
up in arms. You just didn't hear about it.”
Pirozzi first learned of the oil spill in 2006, when he read a small newspaper article
about it and showed it to his neighbors. “People were amazed—'How can there be so
much oil under our houses and nobody told us?' That really pissed me off,” he said. That
year, he joined a $58 billion class-action lawsuit brought against ExxonMobil, BP, and
other alleged polluters of Newtown Creek by the law firm Napoli Bern Ripka LLP. Most
are suing for the loss of their property values, but a few, including Pirozzi, are claiming
the spill affected their health.
ExxonMobil took the position that a dense layer of clay beneath Greenpoint stops
the oil vapors from rising to the surface. This assumption has been contested by inde-
pendent geologists, who believe the clay is porous and allows toxic vapors to filter into
the air and people's homes. ExxonMobil also argued that it was being held responsible
for actions taken decades ago, by people who may not have realized how toxic the pol-
lutants were, in an era when regulation was limited. While that may be true, it does not
explain why the spill has yet to be cleaned up.
A SECRET REVEALED
On a foggy day in October 2002, Basil Seggos, who worked as the chief investigator of
the Hudson Riverkeeper—an environmental group for which Robert Kennedy Jr. is the
chief prosecuting attorney—plowed up Newtown Creek in a wooden boat. He was there
to discover where people were fishing and warn them against eating anything from the
water. As the boat nosed through filth and past abandoned fuel refineries, Seggos no-
ticed oil coating the creek's surface as well as the rocks and old pilings along its edges.
“It was thick. It was everywhere,” he said, as we retraced his course in the Riverkeeper's
thirty-foot motorboat, in 2008. “It was unbelievable to me that a thing this big could be
kept a secret for so long.”
Intrigued, Seggos dug through old newspaper clippings, contacted city officials, and
talked to Greenpoint families. Though he, like Sister Francis, found some residents ta-
citurn at first, the story slowly emerged. What he learned, with the help of Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents, was that Mobil Oil—which was des-
cended from Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and which merged with Exxon in 1999 to form
ExxonMobil—had allegedly worked out an agreement with the state. If the company as-
sumed responsibility for cleaning up the spill , Riverkeeper charged, then state officials
would not subject Mobil to fines or onerous remediation schedules: that way, both sides
could avoid a public outcry and a costly legal battle.