The BP and Greenpoint Oil Spills by Joel Chaffee
The BP and Greenpoint Oil Spills
 by Joel Chaffee
 Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
 New York, NY
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        The media attention given to the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been, appropriately, enormous. Making front and home pages domestically and internationally - from the New York Times to Al Jazeera - the attention garnered is similar to the immensity of the coverage of the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989. What has been interesting about the coverage of the Gulf spill has been the pings of attention being given to the long overlooked Greenpoint Oil Spill, estimated to be between 17 to 30 million gallons, sitting beneath the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.

         Part of the former inattention is due to the nature of the different spills. In Louisiana and Alaska, the spills were enormous and sudden. Television cameras and reporters of all sorts covered the stories like the devastations they were/are. In Greenpoint, the spill has been collecting for decades, even centuries. Clearly not a sensation. The majority of the Greenpoint spill is supposed to have emerged from an explosion in the New York City sewer system in the 1950s, but the spill is also an accumulation of over one hundred years of an unregulated oil industry on Newtown Creek, which the War Department once said was the busiest waterway in the nation. (Exxon and BP own property on the Creek, which also, incidentally, houses the National Grid Greenpoint Energy Center (a Superfund site) and the huge silver eggs of the Newtown Creek Sewage Treatment Plant.)

         While Superfund discussion was hovering around the Creek in 2009, the designation still eludes the massively polluted area. Writing for the New York Times this month, Alex Prud'Homme wonders, "As President Obama condemns the 'cozy relationship' between federal regulators and Big Oil, we might question why New York regulators and companies charged with polluting Newtown Creek took so long to acknowledge the problem." Or why the problem is still unresolved. (It is interesting to note that a recent New Yorker review of Anthony Hamboussi's Newtown Creek: A Photographic Survey of New York's Industrial Waterway, does not mention the Greenpoint spill. One wonders if a review of a book of photographs of Prince William Sound would be satisfactory if it refrained from mentioning the Valdez.) It is true that Exxon has been tasked with the cleanup of the Greenpoint spill . . . since 1991, 13 years after the Coast Guard spotted a plume of the spill leaking into Newtown Creek from Meeker Avenue. (When Brooklyn stopped using the water beneath Greenpoint in the 1970s, it caused the aquifer to rise, pushing the enormous oil spill floating atop the water table up and into the Creek.) 

         Elsewhere, John O'Hara wrote in the Huffington Post ("A Stench Grows in Brooklyn") that seeing Chuck Schumer mooning for the press in the Gulf was fine, but wondered "Why its taken all those decades to see the disaster sitting outside our window." Not to mention taking action to clean it, in one of the most populous locales in his state. Earth Portal, an online scientific encyclopedia and community, designated the week of May 10th as Greenpoint Oil Spill Week, just as BP was showing video clips of their pipe spewing crude into the Atlantic. And at the Wall Street Journal, blogger R.M Schneiderman noted that the Gulf spill "may pale in comparison to the damage done" by the Greenpoint spill. The Greenpoint spill, like Louisiana and Alaska, traces back to Exxon and BP and all the others, which are only descendants of Standard Oil. (Chevron/Texaco sold its plot on the Creek back in the summer of love; to a beverage distributor.) 

        Any media attention on this neglected spill is welcomed, as Exxon continues to run its 'cleanup' operation from the end of Meeker Avenue, where the Coast Guard spotted the thing over thirty years ago. Using the most elderly equipment they can get away with, they use a cone system to skim the oil from the water it sits atop, and collect the unrefined stuff from beneath the neighborhood. Afterwards it is shipped to New Jersey, refined, and sold. As the current spill in the Gulf demonstrates, a fresh crime is interesting; an old crime, still consequential, is old hat. Yesterday's news. But maybe tomorrow's?

Media Sources:

A Stench Grows in Brooklyn (Huffington Post) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wires/2010/05/23/a-stench-grows-in-brookly_ws_586411.html

An Oil Spill Grows in Brooklyn (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16Prudhomme.html

Up the Creek (New Yorker) http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/05/up-the-creek.html Greenpoint Oil Spill (Earth Portal) http://www.earthportal.org/?p=1946

As Gulf Oil Spill Worsens, Looking to Newtown Creek (Wall Street Journal) http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2010/04/30/remembering-brooklyns-own-oil-spill-disaster/


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Last updated by Joel Chaffee - Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 -  New York, NY

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