Commentators can't help but compare the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster, which leaked 11 million gallons of crude into the water, killed countless animals, and tarnished the owner of the damaged tanker, Exxon. Yet the leader of botched containment efforts in the critical hours after the tanker ran aground wasn't Exxon Mobil Corp. It was BP PLC, the same firm now fighting to plug the Gulf leak.
BP owned a controlling interest in the Alaska oil industry consortium responsible for cleaning up the spill. People who had a front-row seat to the Alaska spill tell the AP that BP's actions in the Gulf suggest it hasn't changed much at all. "It's the same cleanup techniques," said one lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and it's "no more likely to do any good than it did in 1989."
(More Exxon Valdez stories.)