Friday, October 19, 2012

BP Wants Sweetheart Oil Spill Settlement

Brown Pelicans Wait for Cleaning at Ft. JacksonI spent weeks covering the Gulf oil disaster for the National Wildlife Federation, so to hear that BP thinks it can bully the Justice Department into giving it a sweetheart settlement deal? What's the word I'm looking for?

Malarkey.

I recently moved from the DC area to New Bedford, MA, whose waters have been fouled by not one but two major oil spills in the last 40 years - the Florida barge spill in 1969 and the Bouchard No. 120 spill in 2003. You may not have heard much about either of those spills because New Bedford ain't exactly Miami Beach, but fishermen and wildlife lovers can still tell you plenty about the reduced catches and silent marshes.

Gulf Coast residents can stop me if this sounds familiar: The companies responsible wrote their checks, the government cleaned up what it could & moved on, but the oil from both spills isn't hard to find.

Tell U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to hold BP fully accountable.

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