BP's Oil Spill? Exxon's in '70s Tops It

Editor's note: A representative of Exxon Mobil responded to this article after it was published. You can read that response here.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In the late 1970s, someone figured out that a giant hub of fuel storage tanks was leaking toxic sludge into the East River, which separates northwest Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan.

You'd think that by 2010, it would have been cleaned up. And you'd think that the person who figured it out might've been someone from the Department of the Interior, which regulates oil companies, or the Environmental Protection Agency, which -- well, protects the environment, or even from the oil companies themselves.

A bulkhead on Newtown Creek in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the waters have been contaminated with refinery sludge for more than three decades.

Nope.

Instead, the 50-plus acre, multimillion-gallon spill is still being cleaned up by an oil conglomerate more than three decades after it was discovered. The spill happened to be identified by a couple of Coast Guard agents who weren't even in the water. They were performing what was later described in a federal report as a "routine" inspection -- by helicopter.

Newtown Creek may represent the largest oil spill in history -- at an estimated 30 million gallons -- albeit one that no one talks about. The oil company initially charged with cleaning it up, Exxon Mobil (XOM), has been sluggish, to say the least. Regulators charged with hastening the process have played hot potato with Newtown Creek, until a widely read publication writes yet another scathing story. After standing on a podium to announce new action, politicians go back to forgetting Newtown Creek's existence.

This is not a defense of BP (BP), the oil conglomerate now battling its own large, expensive, high-profile oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But it is a critique of how the oil industry operates with unbridled callousness while regulators and politicians turn a blind eye until things explode once again.

To wit, BP has now had two major oil spills in the past five years. Both of them were offshore of American soil, perpetrated by a wealthy foreign entity.

The first one, in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay, combined with a 2005 refinery blast that killed 15 workers, helped lead to the departure of BP's chief executive at the time, Lord John Browne, whose noble stature as the Baron of Madingley didn't win him any points in the board room. To say that the string of operational disasters has given BP a giant black eye in terms of public relations is putting it mildly.

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