Oil Over Again: From the Exxon Valdez to BP and Beyond

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 123-127

123

Oil Over Again:

From the Exxon Valdez

to BP and Beyond

By Oliver Houck

Cleaning Up : The Story Behind the B iggest Legal Bonanz a of Our

Time, by David Lebedoff. Free Press. 336 pages.

From the July/ August 2010 issue of The Environmental Forum.

I

am writing this review in New Orleans

with a bitter smell in the air. ey are

burning o phenols a nd di spersants

from the Deepwater Horizon blowout,  fty

miles to the south, which local public health

ocials assure us, without knowing ex actly

what is being incinerated, is no problem.

But if our eyes begin to bu rn, they advise

that we stay indo ors. British Petroleum’s

CEO has just opined safely from London

that the spill is “tiny” given the size of the

Gulf of Mexico.

Which bring s to mind that last great spill

in North America, the one that broug ht a

sea cha nge in the law but very little chang e

in the hig h risk practice of oshore deep-

well drilling. e literature on the British Petroleum disaster is of course yet

to be written, but the story of the Exxon Valdez is suddenly pertinent a nd

has been told in se veral ways. e most gripping of all is David Lebedo”s

1997 book Cleaning Up: e Story Behind the Biggest Legal Bonanza of

Our Time, a courtroom t hriller on the Exxon Valdez civil damages trial, a

ve-year m arathon pitt ing some 14,000 shers ag ainst the most powerf ul

corporation on earth. Once a gain timely, t his is a book worth taking o

the shelf. It portrays what L ouisianans will now be facing, probably for