By Raanan Geberer
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

GREENPOINT — After years of being put on the defensive about its alleged foot-dragging in cleaning up the giant underground oil spill in this neighborhood, oil giant ExxonMobil is now doing some public relations work of its own.

ExxonMobil is in the picture because it is the successor to several oil companies that once had refineries on the Newtown Creek, which separates Greenpoint from Long Island City, Queens. Several industrial accidents in the 1950s led to the spill, which was first mapped in 1978.

In its new brochure, “ExxonMobil Progress,� printed in both English and Polish (presumably because Greenpoint is the city’s largest Polish-American community), ExxonMobil praises itself for its cleanup of the oil spill.

One of its headlines is “New Water Treatment and Discharge Permit Means Full Speed Ahead for Product Recovery.� Another stresses “Community Participation in Our Application Process,� recounting a meeting last November where the company’s engineers spoke to community residents.

Yet another article, about the government-brokered cleanup of the oil spill (or “plume,�), stresses that the company regularly checks monitoring points at more than 240 locations in the neighborhood.

An accompanied map, in different colors, compares “Plume 1978� and “Plume 2007,� about one-fifth the size of the original plume after years of cleanup activities. The map also points out the little-known fact that part of the site next to Newtown Creek is managed by BP and Chevron.

Four years ago, Councilmen David Yassky and Eric Gioia, Borough President Marty Markowitz and the environmental organization Riverkeeper filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the oil giant is dragging its feet in its cleanup activities.

Yesterday, critics of ExxonMobil weren’t impressed by the company’s new outreach program, which also includes a web site, exxonmobil.com/greenpoint.

“No matter what ExxonMobil wants us to believe, they have continued to drag their feet when it comes to cleaning up the mess they made in Greenpoint,� said Councilmember Yassky, who sued the company in 2004. “Time and again, ExxonMobil has shown that it has little interest in transparency or accountability to the people of Brooklyn and Queens.�

“New Yorkers affected by this decades-old oil spill in Newtown Creek need more than slick PR — they need results and accountability,� said Gioia, who represents a Queens district near the creek. Christine Horowitz, a board member of Neighbors Allied for Good Growth (NAG), said she hadn’t seen the leaflet, but wondered about ExxonMobil’s before-and-after comparison. Recent research by the Environmental Protection Agency, she said, indicates that the oil spill may be more than 17 million gallons — it could be as many as 30 million.

Basil Seggos, chief investigator for Riverkeeper, said that while ExxonMobil has indeed mounted some cleanup efforts, it has defined its job narrowly as cleaning up the spill itself — not cleaning up pollution in the creek, remediating soil contamination in the area, or remediating ground-water contamination.

ExxonMobil’s public relations effort, he said, is “really nothing new.� As for the lawsuit, it is still in the discovery phase.

© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2008
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