If history is our best teacher, a Twin Cities attorney told the U.S. Senate, the victims of the Gulf oil spill might be in for some very hard lessons. Brian O'Neill, the lead attorney for some 32,000 Alaska fishermen in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, was the star witness in a Judiciary subcommittee hearing Tuesday chaired by Minnesota Democrats Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken. O'Neill's report was not encouraging. Besides the financial reverses, which were substantial (particularly after the U.S. Supreme Court trimmed punitive damages down to $507 million – a tenth of the original jury award), local residents also suffered high rates of depression, suicide, bankruptcy, divorce and tax problems. "Oil spills drastically impact the financial lives of fishermen," said O'Neill, a partner at Faegre & Benson. "But they also destroy communities." O'Neill says he spent a career litigating the "drunk driving" case of ship captain Joseph Hazelwood, who ran the Exxon Valdez tanker hard aground in Prince William Sound in March, 1989. In the intervening 21 years, more than 6,000 of the victims have died, and some of the $1 billion in total restitution has been slowed by the sort stuff that happens in life: legal wrangling, estate disputes, bankruptcies, marital problems.
Some of Exxon's last payments were only received n the last year, he said. Even with BP's $20 billion spill response fund – something that the victims of the Exxon Valdez didn't have – Klobuchar says that Alaska's experience leaves plenty of room for skepticism about BP's assurances that it will make the victims of the 100-day old Gulf spill whole, especially once the full extent of the environmental and economic damage becomes clear. "Exxon used every legal trick in the book to prevent the victims of the oil spill from getting compensation," Klobuchar said. "While BP's executives sound outraged and contrite now, who's to say that won't change in two to three years?" Franken called it "a pretty harrowing story" and criticized the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling slicing the punitive damages as "an activist, conservative decision in favor of Exxon." Adding to the Minnesota flavor of the discussion was Alaska's Democratic Sen. Mark Begich, the son of Eveleth, Minn., native Nick Begich. The only other senator in the room was Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a Republican who cautioned about the difficulty of allocating restitution to spill victims and the dangers of "ripping off the fund." While maintaining that BP must pay for the spill, he noted, "every corporation is entitled to the protection of the law." Either way, as in Alaska, the sense of impending cross-claims and litigation remains. Or, as Begich said, "the scars remain."
