The Spill Beneath Greenpoint

Beneath the ground around Newtown Creek here lies an oil spill roughly three times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster, and almost nobody outside this neighborhood has ever heard of it. It was never one catastrophic accident. Instead, oil leaked slowly out of refineries and storage tanks along this stretch of Greenpoint for decades, soaking into the soil largely unnoticed.

The spill came to public attention in September of nineteen seventy eight, when a United States Coast Guard helicopter on a routine patrol spotted a plume of oil flowing into the creek from a bulkhead near Meeker Avenue. Investigators eventually traced it back to petroleum operations that had been running in this neighborhood since the eighteen forties, when more than fifty separate oil processing plants operated here, many of them later absorbed into Standard Oil and run by companies including Mobil, ExxonMobil, and Amoco.

Estimating the total size of the spill took years. A report from the Environmental Protection Agency in two thousand seven put the figure at around thirty million gallons of oil and petroleum products, soaked into the ground over decades of operation, roughly three times the volume of the Exxon Valdez spill that fouled the coast of Alaska in nineteen eighty nine.

Cleanup here has continued for decades, with pumps and monitoring wells working to recover oil still trapped underground. The creek beside you looks calm on the surface. Underneath it, the ground still holds one of the quietest, longest running environmental disasters this country has ever produced.