On May 19th, 2015, a pipeline owned by “Plains All American” ruptured, and leaked thousands
of gallons of oil into the ocean near Santa Barbara.
Unfortunately, this was not the company’s first spill.
Like many oil-related disasters, it caused significant damage to the ecosystem, with
great loss of plant and animal life.
So what happens now?
Who gets the blame, and what are the penalties for oil spills?
Well, usually the company overseeing the oil when it’s spilled is the most at fault.
But there are cases where a single person is charged as well.
The captain of a ship which spills oil, for instance, may be investigated for negligence.
In the case of the Exxon Valdez (val-DEEZ), 11 million gallons of oil was spilled along
the Alaskan coast in 1989.
The ship’s captain was convicted of a misdemeanor and fined $50,000 dollars.
But penalties for large oil companies can have a much bigger price tag.
In the Exxon Valdez case, oil giant, Exxon Mobil was originally ordered to pay more than
$5 Billion dollars in damages.
However, that number was later reduced to about 500 million.
For the Deepwater Horizon incident, considered one of the biggest oil spills of all time,
oil company BP has paid about $30 billion dollars *so far* in cleanup efforts and damages.
In the United States, these fines are levied out by several regulatory agencies, on both
state and federal levels.
The main prosecutors are often the US Coast Guard or the Environmental Protection Agency.
They use the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 to sue for monetary compensation of the cleanup
and the ecosystem destruction.
Other state or federal courts may invoke further civil penalties against the company for illegal
or negligent business practices.
How are those penalties assessed?
Well, researchers judge how many total gallons were estimated to have been spilled along,
with any mitigating factors.
The penalty per gallon can be more expensive if the spill site is in a sensitive ecosystem,
if the oil is really toxic, if there was a delay notifying government officials, or if
the company is a repeat offender.
In the case of BP’s Deepwater Horizon, a judge found the company to be “grossly negligent”,
which carried a maximum fine of $4,300 dollars per spilled barrel.
This is nearly quadruple what the maximum fine would have been if the judge found BP
guilty of only “simple negligence”.
But although many environmentalists encourage even more drastic fines, the ultimate goal
of anti-pollution legislation is not to completely bankrupt companies.
Instead, it’s meant to scare them into taking more precautions against oil-spills.
The American Petroleum Institute has reported that even as US oil imports and exports have
increased around the world, spills, on average, have declined internationally.
In the case of the recent Santa Barbara spill, federal authorities are already on the scene,
investigating who is at fault, and the extent of the damage.
Because the US has some of the strictest laws regarding oil spills in the world, “Plains
All American” will likely experience long court battles, and huge fines.
The largest oil spill in history took place in the Persian Gulf, and has left devastating
effects to this day.
To learn more about this disaster, check out this video from Seeker.
There’s a link to that video in the description below, and as always, thanks for watching!