The Mystery of Newtown Creek - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 17

Riverkeeper's FOIA requests then turned up ExxonMobil documents they main-
tained showed that the company was aware that benzene had been leaking into the
ground and water for at least a decade, and that the company had dragged its feet on
cleaning it up.
In 2004, Riverkeeper and several Brooklyn politicians filed a lawsuit against three oil
companies: ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron. They charged that toxic fumes from the spill
had endangered people's health and property. Riverkeeper also alleged that ExxonMobil
violated federal environmental laws. Girardi & Keese, the law firm made famous for
collaborating with Erin Brockovich to sue PG&E in California, filed a separate case on
behalf of five hundred plaintiffs. (These cases were later consolidated.) The oil com-
panies denied the allegations . In 2006, the state's then attorney general, Eliot Spitzer,
announced he would investigate the Newtown Creek oil spill. In 2007, his successor,
Andrew Cuomo, sued ExxonMobil to force a cleanup. In 2008 the EPA agreed to test
four industrial sites along the creek for toxic chemicals.
As in the case of the potentially toxic dust generated at Ground Zero on 9/11, no one
really knows how the chemicals polluting Newtown Creek have affected people's health.
There is no conclusive link between the oil and chemical spill and human sickness in
Greenpoint.
An ExxonMobil spokeswoman pointed out that the company has had no active re-
finery operations in Greenpoint since 1963 and no terminal operations there since 1993 .
ExxonMobil's lead counsel on the spill, Peter Sacripanti , said it was not clear where
the pollutants originated from, or who was responsible for them, and maintained that
ExxonMobil should not be held liable for an environmental mess created at a time when
standards were less stringent than they are today. “We do not believe we should be re-
quired to compensate the City of New York for someone else's contamination,” a com-
pany statement read.
After a 1990 consent decree, the company agreed to remediate a portion of the oil
beneath Brooklyn by 2007. To do so, ExxonMobil used a system of recovery wells, stor-
age tanks, and groundwater monitors. The wells use a dual-phase recovery system, in
which a pump draws down the water table in a specific area while oil is sucked up. The
water that is pumped out is treated and emptied back into Newtown Creek; the petro-
leum recovered is shipped to a refinery in New Jersey, where it is reprocessed for use.
(BP ran four additional wells in Greenpoint.)
Environmentalists characterized the remediation efforts as “rudimentary.” By 2007,
the oil companies had removed a total of nine million gallons of oil. A containment
boom at the Peerless bulkhead allowed for the skimming of twenty-eight thousand gal-
lons of oil from the surface of Newtown Creek, but it is hardly an oil-tight barrier—as I
witnessed when I toured the creek with Riverkeeper in 2008, and on other visits in 2009