GEC Research Proposal
Feride, Kebe, Bavi, Edwin
The challenge we would like to try and approach is access to clean water, with a specific focus on the Exxon Mobile oil spill of Newtown Creek, Brooklyn, its repercussions and cleanup efforts. Our main aim is to draw general attention to the existence of this contamination and assist the community in its cleanup. Although it is the largest oil spill in the U.S. with up to 30 million gallons of oil spilling into the creek and surrounding groundwater, it has gone by largely unnoticed.
Right now there is intense excitement surrounding the Newtown Creek spill because of the recent favorable developments, namely, the fact that ExxonMobil has agreed to clean up the oil spill it has caused. On the 17th of November, 2010, Riverkeeper and the New York State Attorney General, together with the community in Greenpoint, Brooklyn announced a settlement in the federal suit against ExxonMobil. After an eight year campaign by the environmental organization called Riverkeeper, ExxonMobil has promised to investigate and cleanup the contamination and established a $ 19.5 million dollar fund to reduce pollution and propitiate environmental restoration. Now the role of Riverkeeper and the Greenpoint community is to assist in these cleanup and restoration efforts, and most importantly make sure that ExxonMobil keeps to the schedule it has announced. One of the requirements of the Consent Decree signed by Exxon is that a plan to involve the community must be submitted within 90 days. This seems to be a very feasible task, especially since there is an NGO called the Newtown Creek Alliance (NCA) which partakes a direct role in protecting the creek, collecting oral histories and promoting the cause to the community. The Newtown Creek Alliance seems to be an organization that will help immensely with our project.
As part of our project, we are planning to meet with and interview members of the Newtown Creek Alliance. Possible candidates include Kathleen Schmid, founder and director of the NCA, and Paul Parkhill, an urban planner working in cooperation with the Alliance. They will be able to provide valuable information about the influence and progress of the NCA, as well as any available information concerning the remediation efforts. In addition, we will be visiting the Greenpoint community and interviewing residential members of the NCA, in order to hear their stories and discover practical ways we can get involved in the current restoration effort.
In line with this goal of getting involved, the Consent Decree signed by Exxon Mobil itself, as well as ExxonMobil’s Action Plan and the Final Report of the Newtown Creek Alliance, will be analyzed in depth for our project. Riverkeeper may be another possible source of information, as they play an active role in overseeing the schedule and actions of Exxon Mobil. Also the EPA’s Report on the situation of the water contamination in the Creek may serve as a further, reliable source.
Finally, we are planning to film the process of our going to and getting acquainted with the community, as well as the current problem in order to make a short documentary. The aim here would be to draw attention to this largely unnoticed and seemingly unsignificant but critical environmental disruption. We plan to make this the story of our own discovery, our research and our involvement.
