Can We Trust Exxon To Pay for Pegasus Tar Sands Spill Cleanup? Their History Suggests Otherwise

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Where to begin? How about Valdez, Alaska? Exxon fought paying damages and appealed court decisions multiple times, and they have still not paid in full. Years of fighting and court appeals on Exxon’s part finally concluded with a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2008 that found that Exxon only had to pay $507.5 million of the original 1994 court decree for $5 billion in punitive damages. And as of 2009, Exxon had paid only$383 million of this $507.5 million to those who sued, stalling on the rest and fighting the $500 million in interest owed to fishermen and other small businesses from more than 12 years of litigation.

But Valdez was a long time ago. What about more recent history? In 2006, a fuel line leak at an Exxon service station in Jacksonville, Maryland (that the company hid from the public for five weeks) released 26,000 gallons of gasoline underground, severely polluting local groundwater and causing irreparable damages to many local homes. The company paid $46 million for cleanup, but fought hard in the courts to avoid paying any subsequent damages. The company successfully scuttled two separate law suits on appeals processes, winning the latter claim just this past February.

Even more recently, you’ll recall the ExxonMobil pipeline that leaked 63,000 gallons of crude directly into Montana’s iconic Yellowstone River. Again, the company put forth $135 million for immediate cleanup costs (and repair work for the line, so that they could get it back in operation as soon as possible), but balked at the prospect of paying for damages.
So we might ask ExxonMobil not only if they’ll pay for the “cleanup costs” as they narrowly define them, but if they’ll make it right for the residents of Mayflower.

http://desmogblog.com/2013/04/03/can-we-trust-exxon-pay-pegasus-tar-sands-spill-cleanup