Vultures Picnic – My Home is Now a Strange Place (Installment 2)

By Zach Roberts

It’s weird where life takes you.

In 2006, I started working for Greg Palast. He was one of my heroes. Most people know him for breaking the story of the stolen 2000 election. That was how I was introduced to his work as well, but the story that made me want to work for him was one of the lesser known ones from his best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy “A Well-Designed Disaster: The Untold Story of the Exxon Valdez.” It blew me away.  Everything I knew about one of the most important events in American history was completely and utterly wrong. The drunk captain had nothing to do with it.

About a year into working with Palast, I found an unpublished manuscript that he had written 20 years ago on the Valdez disaster – an entire book detailing what really happened. I grabbed and and freaked out – “What the heck is this?” He just laughed a bit and said, “I guess it’s my first book. No one would publish it. They liked the drunk skipper version of the story.” I slipped it into my bag, and and started reading it on my 2-hour commute back home to Brooklyn from my unpaid internship with him.

A couple weeks ago,  you got a small taste of his new book Vultures’ Picnic – but after a conversation with Palast about giving you all another excerpt he said, “They’re the only ones who will get it. F**k it, give them the whole thing, just make sure they spread it around and buy the book!”

Well Mudpups, I talked to Jeanne, and we’re serializing the entire chapter (the ONLY website we’re doing this for – not the Nation, not HuffPost – only on TheMudfalts.net)

So here ya go – a Mudflats/Greg Palast exclusive – Part 2 of Chapter 7 – “My Home Is Now a Strange Place”

*************************************
By Greg Palast

Maybe Nicholas Kompkoff was a “dumb, drunk Injun.” Maybe not. I write this at Nicholas’s grave on Evans Island, at the New Chenega village. Over here you can see the Arch Priest Nicholas Kompkoff Clinic and sobriety center and the little church with the blue cupola completed in time for Nicholas to lead his last prayers, and the two dozen little bungalows for the returned Natives, almost every one a millionaire. Let us pause and pretend this is the happy ending. No sense jumping ahead to the tragic conclusion just yet.

* * *

Humble Oil and its less Humble parent, Exxon, came through, lobbying Congress to give Chenegans ownership of both the old village and the new one on Evans Island chosen by geologists as safe from tsunamis. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Great Earthquake, the families of New Chenega sailed to the old village to lay crosses among the ruins. Then, they sailed back to bless their new homes. It was Good Friday, 1989.

That night, at four minutes past midnight, the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled more than eleven million gallons of oil. The black wave soon engulfed the old village, then the new one, and then its fishing grounds, blinding and burning every seal in their rookery, smothering all shellfish, killing a million birds, slathering contaminants across one thousand miles of waterfront, and leaving New Chenega isolated in a poisoned sea. The three thousand years of Chugachmiut life subsisting on the Sound’s waters had come to its end.

Mudqnò. That is all. There is no more.

WORLD TRADE CENTER, NEW YORK

Until March 24, 1989, the morning of the spill, no one cared if a Chugach Native dropped dead, which they did, often and young. But, beginning four minutes past midnight, these Natives, for the lucky lawyers who caught one, became a summer house in the Hamptons, a Mercedes with all the trimmings, Rod Stewart singing you “Happy Birthday,” a younger mistress, and a new trophy wife. One Chugach was worth—I don’t want to exaggerate—maybe a fifth of their weight in golden legal fees. Each Native was redeemable, like coupons,
for all these things, Rod Stewart included, if only you could get yourself a Chugach.

The silver-haired attorney Melvin Belli was accosted by a fellow passenger on the first flight from San Francisco to Anchorage. “I see, Mr. Belli, you are chasing ambulances again.” Belli replied, “Madame, I get there before the ambulance.”

This would be a legal turkey shoot for plaintiffs’ lawyers. Within days of the tanker grounding, Exxon said it would pay for all the damage. The Exxon man said so on TV. Exxon would do, “whatever it takes to keep you whole.” No risk, then: Get yourself a Native, sue, and take your slice. Quick, easy, lucrative. On the other side of the table, oil company lawyers did not just dream of Mercedes. They ordered them the day the tanker grounded: From four minutes after midnight, they began billing a Malibu beach house a week—and they would get it, win or lose.

I was trying to wake up the guy who slept in the box in front of my office door on Second Avenue. My neighbor hadn’t yet swept up the crack vials (she made them into art objects). I had coffee in one hand, a bagel with scallion cream cheese in the other, and I could hear my phone ringing and ringing upstairs. I paid the guy in the box his toll (fifty cents), ran up the flight (Doesn’t anyone sweep these steps?), and got the message to get to the World Trade Center “right now, Palast.”

Hill, Betts and Nash is one of those quiet white-shoe firms that provide discreet representation for Her Majesty and the Lloyd’s list on matters of Admiralty Law. They made certain Britannia ruled the waves, including handling the last little mess BP made in the Torrey Canyon crack-up. These gentlemen would not rush off to Prince William Sound to grab themselves an Indian. But Hill, Betts could count on the Native-napping lawyers to call on them to actually handle matters of the law of the sea.

Lawyers need facts (now and again) on which to argue the case and calculate the damages and thereby their fees. So when I saw Exxon’s tanker on the front page that morning, I figured I’d get a call. As a detective, I specialized in the work most sober people would find numbingly dull, requiring the creation (or destruction) of proprietary computer algorithms, but mostly, deep dives into tens of thousands of pages of corporate documents and account books, decades old and covered with dust and bullshit. It was worth millions, even billions, to my clients, and in return, they paid for my bagels.

I took the message, ran downstairs, jumped the box (I only paid going in, not out), and cabbed it to World Trade Tower One, where Hill, Betts commandeered the entire fifty-second floor. I walked past the stares at reception (I dressed like a slob), down a discreet, carpeted hall lined with models of clippers, steamers, cruise liners, and the portraits of the mustachioed founders of the firm, to the office of the Senior Partner. It always knocked me out: the view of the Statue of Liberty when I worked there into the night and, when I bothered to look down, the pretty lights of the jam-up on the West Side Highway.

“You’ll love this one, Palast. It’s got everything for you: a big bad oil company, trees and birds covered in oil—and poor little Indians.” Greg O’Neill enjoyed making fun of bleeding-heart liberals like me. At the reception desk, I had picked up an envelope with a Delta ticket to Anchorage. “Palast”—O’Neill grinned some more—“I’m telling you: This will be your Vietnam.” Well, at least the ticket was first class.

* * *

The first thing our new Chugach clients ordered our gold-plated legal team to do was sue to prevent the Exxon Valdez from returning to their Alaskan waters. Not any other tanker, just the Exxon Valdez. The Natives hoped to ward off the return of the Tanker of Death, the vessel of the Deceiver, the Raven, the one who had killed his grandchildren with broken promises. You can call it goofy, you can call it superstitious. But the U.S. Congress did not find the Natives’ demand to bar the Devil Ship as insane as you might find it. In 1990, Congress voted the ban into law. But then, insanity has never deterred Congress.

Ultimately, Exxon did patch up the supertanker, rechristening it with a name suggested by thoughtful PR consultants: VLCC SeaRiver Mediterranean. But the Natives weren’t fooled. They were wise enough to demand the ship’s banishment from Alaska no matter what name Exxon painted on its bow. By winning passage of the “Tanker of Death” law, the Natives had succeeded in keeping the cursed Exxon Valdez/SeaRiver away from Alaska. The problem is that the Natives’ satanic blackbird god is a trickster, never wearing the same mask twice. “Careful,” my late Eyak friend Laughing Eagle told me, “Satan is a beautiful woman, the most beautiful woman.” The Devil never appears in the form you are expecting.

In May 1996, after the ban on the devil ship went into effect, Exxon’s Mobil unit launched a new tanker for the Alaska run. I called the company, but no one could tell me why they named the new tanker the VLCC Raven.

* * *

It was the most expensive tanker launch ever. Never in the history of shipbuilding has a buyer spent so many millions on publicizing a new ship that didn’t take passengers. The oil giant ran double-page ads in papers across America trumpeting the vessel they cutely called “two of the safest ships ever built,” meaning that there was one tanker inside another, a “double-hull” ship. If the outer hull collides with a reef, the oil remains safely inside the second, inner hull. It would have prevented “most of history’s collision-caused spills,” the ads told us.

The oil company’s big ads were headlined, “QUOTH THE RAVEN: NEVERMORE” But then, that’s what Raven always says. Once again, we encounter V. S. Naipaul’s axiom about imperial chiefs: They don’t lie, they elide. Here’s what the oily eliders left out: In 1971, eighteen years before the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef, the Alaska State Legislature passed a very un-insane law requiring the use of double-hulled tankers on the Valdez oil route. But Chevron, Exxon and Mobil sued to block the double-hull law. They won. In other words, had the oil companies not killed the law, the Exxon Valdez would have had two hulls and the spill
would never have occurred.

Mobil built its much-ballyhooed double-hull tanker in 1996 simply because the company had no choice. Double hulls were written into federal law right after the Exxon Valdez disaster. Back in 1971, British Petroleum was still the baby sister of the oil giants. New on the scene, BP dutifully built three double-hull tankers to operate from Valdez in accordance with the Alaska law. But when their oil company siblings sued and won the right to go one-hull naked, BP spent several million dollars rerouting the ship’s pipes to fill in the safety gap between the two hulls. This marked the first time in history that an oil corporation made a major investment in deliberately making their ships less safe.

[to be continued on Thursday]

Comments

comments