When Laura Hofmann steps out her front door and takes a deep breath, she’s sometimes overwhelmed by petroleum vapors. Hofmann, a lifelong resident of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, doesn’t live next door to a gas station; she lives beside the nation’s largest oil spill.

An estimated 17 million gallons of oil (at least one-and-a-half times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in 1989) from spills at ExxonMobil’s Greenpoint refineries and storage facilities soaked into the ground over the last century, creating a 55-acre plume of oil floating on top of groundwater 30-40 feet underground. Residents of this working-class neighborhood have been living with the spill for more than 50 years, enduring vapors seeping into some basements and wafting through the streets from nearby Newtown Creek, which the petroleum trickles into. A cleanup has been going on for three decades, but only about half of the oil has been removed. Only recently has the government sought to force accelerated remediation.

“Someone said that if we had otters swimming in Newtown Creek covered in oil, we’d have a better chance of getting this cleaned up, and cleaned up quickly,” says Hoffman. “It’s a sin.”

ExxonMobil and its predecessors have been operating in Greenpoint since the 19th century. The first inkling of the spill came in 1950, when gasoline from an undetermined source leaked into the sewer system and ignited, blowing 25 manhole covers 30 feet into the air and shattering windows in hundreds of Greenpoint homes. The problem stayed underground until 1978 when a Coast Guard helicopter pilot noticed an oil slick on Newtown Creek, prompting an investigation. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation took responsibility for overseeing the cleanup, and between 1978 and 1989 a mere 770,000 gallons of petroleum were recovered using wells to suck oil out of the ground; the product is sent to a recycling facility.

In 1990, following the Exxon Valdez spill, the state required ExxonMobil to recover the petroleum, but the company wasn’t given a deadline, and didn’t have to pay any penalties, clean up the soil or the creek, or conduct a public health study.

After decades of waiting for the state or the company to remove the oil, environmental groups and residents turned to the courts. In 2004, environmental nonprofit Riverkeeper filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil to clean up the soil, groundwater, and Newtown Creek; Hofmann is a co-plaintiff on that lawsuit, as are several local elected officials. Since then, other residents have filed two more lawsuits. But not until last summer did the state take what residents view as substantial action. In July, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo brought suit against ExxonMobil and four other companies to speed up the remediation and force them to pay millions of dollars in fines. A US District Court hearing on the matter is scheduled for April 16.

“Now that the state is on same page, it will be much easier in the long run to watchdog the cleanup and to force upgrades when necessary,” says Basil Seggos, chief investigator for Riverkeeper. “But keeping the oil out of Newtown Creek and pumping it out of the ground faster is just the tip of the iceberg. The groundwater and soil contamination and the soil vapor issue still need to be addressed.”

To accelerate oil removal, ExxonMobil is currently adding 10 new recovery wells, bringing its total to 21. Chevron and BP also have several recovery wells pulling petroleum from the underground plume.

Posted on Feb 29, 2008 at 7:59 AM
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