Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Settlement a Bad Joke

11,0000,000 GALLON MISHAPS NOW DOWNGRADED TO NUMBER 3 DISASTER

Just past midnight on Good Friday 1989, The Exxon Valdez, a tanker the size of three football pitches, crashed onto a reef in Prince William Sound spewing millions of gallons of heavy crude. Within days, 1,500 miles of coast were polluted, leaving a trail of dying oil-drenched wildlife. Hundreds of thousands of birds were killed, and thousands of sea otters died alongside harbour seals, whales and brown bears.

HIGHLIGHTS
The estimated initial death toll of the spill included 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 killer whales, billions of salmon and herring eggs, and other intertidal plants and animals. Some injured species are still recovering, some will never recover, including humans:

The town of Cordova has become an outpost of despair, where debt and destitution have given rise to alcoholism, drug abuse, broken marriages and numerous suicides. About 1,000 of the original 32,000 plaintiffs in the class-action suit against Exxon have died, many of them succumbing to respiratory illnesses, brain tumors and cancers that a growing body of scientific evidence has linked to the spill and the subsequent clean-up.

Once the Gold Standard of U.S. Environmental disasters, Exxon Valdez has now fallen to number three behind the instant Hall of Fame contender Deepwater Horizon problem and the little known billion gallons of fly ash spilled in Eastern Tennessee.

UPDATE: SUPREME COURT ULTIMATELY PIMPS FOR EXXON

$507 Million? Is that a joke?

After 20 years of fighting compensatory damages, Exxon landed its case in front of the Roberts Supreme Court, with predictable results:

As of early 2006, Exxon had still not paid a dime in compensatory damages, having delayed any semblance of justice for 17 years. Following oral arguments heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on January 27, 2006, the damages award was cut to $2.5 billion on December 22, 2006. The court cited recent Supreme Court rulings relative to limits on punitive damages.

Exxon appealed again. On May 23, 2007, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied ExxonMobil's request for a third hearing and let stand its ruling that Exxon owes $2.5 billion in punitive damages. Exxon then appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case. On February 27, 2008, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for 90 minutes. In a decision issued June 25, 2008, Justice David Souter issued the judgment of the court, vacating the $2.5 billion award and remanding the case back to a lower court, finding that the damages were excessive with respect to maritime common law. Exxon's actions were deemed "worse than negligent but less than malicious." The judgment limits punitive damages to the compensatory damages, which for this case were calculated as $507.5 million. Some lawmakers, such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy, have decried the ruling as "another in a line of cases where this Supreme Court has misconstrued congressional intent to benefit large corporations."

The people of Prince William Sound and adjacent areas in Alaska continue to suffer from the Exxon Valdez oil spill’s effects on fisheries and subsistence resources that have never fully recovered.

Read more about Exxon's legal tactics

Return to the Hall of Fame Map.