Posted on 10/17/2015 3:06:55 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
Federal authorities and officials in Alaska are closing their cases on the Exxon Valdez disaster, nearly 26 years after the grounded supertanker unleashed what was then the worst US oil spill.
The Justice Department and its Alaskan counterpart had been seeking additional cleanup funds from ExxonMobil after a decline in harlequin ducks and sea otters in oil-stricken Prince William Sound. The drop in populations had been blamed on buried oil that remained long after the 1989 disaster, but the Justice Department said those species have since rebounded to pre-spill levels and that the lingering oil "is no longer biologically significant to these species."
The decision brings to an end the court cases against Exxon, now ExxonMobil, that followed the 11-million-gallon spill in 1989.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.vice.com ...
No longer biologically significant, until it is politically expedient.
Closed but not forgotten. Many famous people who never got within 1000 miles of Prince William Sound (including one radio personality who never worked a day in his life) proclaimed the clean up a success, when it was not. Easy to gloss over something one was never part of and only saw in pictures, but never in person, nor lived with it.
As far as I know, the herring have never recovered, nor has the once crystal clear water returned. Various salmon runs have rebounded somewhat, but are never going to meet the promise they held before the spill.
Fishermen, while some made good money during the clean up operations, lost money they can never recover. The original $16 billion claim was whittled down, through incessant law suits up to SCOTUS, to $1 billion most of which was counted as used during the clean up, and as a result fishermen saw less than pennies on losses (my claim for 700K was reduced to 2K). None of which made up for losses over the resulting decades: more than one person died, more than one family broke up as a direct result.
Federal authorities and officials in Alaska are washing their hands again of the Exxon Valdez disaster ... by putting forth more propaganda that the public will believe, while they celebrate, the rest of us fishermen and ex-fishermen pay the price.
Liberals never met a disaster they could not spin into some one else’s fault, ignore or lie about - as long as they feel good about the outcome - nothing else (like reality) matters, and certainly not the people who have to live with the results of the liberal propaganda and celebratory parties.
As a footnote, most of the money spent went to areas other than PWS (Kodiak, Cook Inlet) because the lawyers for PWS were so confident that everyone could see they suffered the most. PWS actually got the least money.
This would have been closed long ago if it was the givermunt that had done it, and US citizens had been burned or crushed alive!
+1
That. Was. Awesome.
26 years... pathetic but expected.
Probably someone who made a career of it is retiring a and no one else wants to dive into the files.
After the oil cap blew in the Gulf of Mexico, biologists were surprised at how little impact it really had. What they hadn’t counted on is that the vast amount of crude oil beneath the Gulf regularly oozed through the rock, to the point where the ecosystem there had long since adapted to it.
Even a great, gushing well of it was minor compared to the totality of the constant ooze.
Crude oil is organic.
How many millions of tax dollars have been wasted keeping the case open? Well, at least it kept the EPA occupied and out of private land owners’ hair.
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