Who’s In Charge Here? At U.S. Oil Spills, It’s Whoever Made the Mess
By Brad Jacobson, Onearth
When ExxonMobil’s Pegasus pipeline burst last month, filling the streets and front lawns of small-town Mayflower, Arkansas, with pools of heavy crude oil, the company followed what has by now become standard protocol: attend to the spill and clamp down on the media. It’s a scenario all too familiar to those journalists who covered 2010’s Deepwater Horizon disaster, and to the people of the Gulf Coast desperate for information about how the BP blowout would affect their health and livelihoods.