New York State sued Exxon Mobil Corp. Tuesday to force the cleanup of a decades-old, 17 million gallon oil spill in New York City. The suit concerns a leak that was discovered in 1978 in Newtown Creek, the waterway that separates the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn. It has formed an underground contamination over 55-acres of the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn, New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement. Cuomo said that besides the cleanup, he is asking Exxon to restore the creek and is seeking substantial financial penalties and damages for the injuries to financial resources. The attorney general filed a notice of intent to sue the company in February.

Greenpoint, a waterfront neighborhood that is a longtime home to Polish immigrants and more recently to hipsters, was an industrial hub for shipbuilding, iron making and refining before World War II. Exxon's property on the creek was the site of one of the earliest refineries of original US oil giant Standard Oil, but most of the refinery structures were decommissioned and demolished after 1969. Mobil Corp., acquired by Exxon in 1999, used some of the property for bulk storage operations until 1993. Exxon could not be immediately reached for comment.

The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, which is in Brooklyn. US District Judge Carol Amon has been assigned to hear the case. In February, Cuomo also filed notices of intent to sue BP Plc, Chevron Corp., utility KeySpan Corp. and mining company Phelps Dodge, which has since been acquired by Freeport-McMoRan over contamination in the creek, but no suits have been filed against those companies yet. A source close to the suit said conversations are ongoing with the other companies.
(By Michael Erman, Planet Ark, 18/07/2007)