Can America clean up from its worst environmental disaster?

The Exxon spill has been cleaned up. It's official this year, and peer reviewed panel of scientists are pretty much in agreement over it. The controversy lingering was the amount of punitive damages Exxon should have paid out.

SAYS EXXON & MINIONS ?

PLEASE GIVES US A FEW LINKS TO BACK UP YOUR ASSESSMENT...

Legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
A special feature published by
the Anchorage Daily News.
http://www.adn.com/evos/evos.html

How much oil remains?

Based on the areas that were studied in the aftermath of the spill, scientists made estimates of the ultimate fate of the oil. A 2001 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study surveyed 96 sites along 8,000 miles of coastline.

A pit dug on a Prince William Sound beach in 2001 revealing oil in the sediments. (Source: NOAA)
The survey distinguished between surface and buried oil. Buried or subsurface oil is of greater concern than surface oil. Subsurface oil can remain dormant for many years before being dispersed and is more liquid, still toxic, and may become biologically available. A disturbance event such as burrowing animals or a severe storm reworks the beach and can reintroduce unweathered oil into the water. Results of the summer shoreline survey showed that the oil remaining on the surface of beaches in Prince William Sound is weathered and mostly hardened into an asphalt-like layer. The toxic components of this type of surface oil are not as readily available to biota, although some softer forms do cause sheens in tide pools.

The survey indicates a total area of approximately 20 acres of shoreline in Prince William Sound are still contaminated with oil. Oil was found at 58 percent of the 91 sites assessed and is estimated to have the linear equivalent of 5.8 km of contaminated shoreline.

In addition to the estimated area of remaining oiled beach, several other important points were evident:
Surface oil was determined to be not a good indicator of subsurface oil.

Twenty subsurface pits were classified as heavily oiled. Oil saturated all of the interstitial spaces and was extremely repugnant. These “worst case” pits exhibited an oil mixture that resembled oil encountered in 1989 a few weeks after the spill—highly odiferous, lightly weathered, and very fluid.
Subsurface oil was also found at a lower tide height than expected (between 0 and 6 feet), in contrast to the surface oil, which was found mostly at the highest levels of the beach. This is significant, because the pits with the most oil were found low in the intertidal zone, closest to the zone of biological production, and indicate that the survey estimates are conservative at best.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

Where do you get the idea they're more interested in damage control (meaning their public image)? It's a disaster, probably could have been avoided. Now they have to pay for it. And they will.

So lemme get this straight:

I'm supposed leave my home state to go down to Tennessee to clean up a mess a corporation business made but will not pay to clean because I'M short-sided?

These people ruin our countryside for a bottom line, but they expect us to pick up after them like spoiled children just so they can do it again elsewhere. That is not MY short-sided viewpoint at work, that's spoiled rich bastards with too much money to burn.

They should be held accountable for the damages they've done to our enviorment and they should have pay to clean it, not hard-working and eco-friendly Americans(unless they happen to be the hard-working Americans paid by said company to clean this mess). It should be an outrage that this even happens, not an inevitabillity.

Hey lifestudent: The TVA is part of the U.S. Government. It's not a corporation. They're gonna fix it because there's 500+ lawmakers breathing down their throats.

What evidence do you have of that? While there's lots of problems we have a pretty good track record of cleaning up massive high profile disasters like this. It's all the little disasters occurring everywhere we have a harder time with.