Breathless in Brooklyn: when they found one of the world's largest oil spills beneath New York City, state, federal, and oil company officials did the only logical thing: they passed the buck

BASIL SEGGOS leans against the rail of the 36-foot harbor patrol boat as it chugs along Newtown Creek into an industrial wasteland of sewer pipes and flotsam, past a huge conveyor belt carrying skeletal cars to the scrap heap and a natural gas facility belching plumes of orange flame. A gentle headwind conveys the odors one at a time: salt, sewage, sulfur, and then the powerful stench of petroleum. "You can really smell it before you can see it," Seggos, the chief investigator for the environmental watchdog Riverkeeper, says, pointing to a black metal bulkhead along the south bank. The boat draws closer, and a purple sheen appears on the surface. "That's all oil," he says. It's the bleeding edge of an environmental disaster, one of the largest oil spills in the world.

The discharge floating on this inland waterway, which divides the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, is just a hint at what lies beneath--anywhere between 17 million and 30 million gallons' worth, a spill more than 50 percent larger than the Exxon Valdez. But unlike the Exxon Valdez, this one has been allowed to grow and fester for half a century, directly below a residential area. Even in the neighborhood--an old-time blue-collar community pocked with hipster enclaves--many people don't know why the air smells like gasoline on rainy days.

"This is a working-class community with a dirty creek in a part of Brooklyn no one really cares about," Seggos says. "It would have perhaps been a better thing if these were river otters covered with oil. You'd have had immediate action."

No one's really sure how long the oil has been there, but most people point to a massive explosion that ripped through the city's sewer system in 1950, raining manhole covers down on the populace. City officials blamed gasoline leaking from what was then Mobil's Brooklyn refinery. Mobil denied it. That was pretty much the extent of the investigation, and for a couple of decades the oil quietly continued to drip into the soil and groundwater under the refinery, spreading beneath the neighborhood and oozing--a tenth of an inch every hour-to-ward the bank of Newtown Creek.

In 1978, a Coast Guard helicopter spotted an oil slick on the creek. Investigating further, the Guard discovered the 55-acre monster that had by then massed beneath the city. Chemical analysis fingered Mobil as the source, and again the company said it wasn't at fault. By now, Mobil had sold part of the refinery to Amoco and was using the rest for storage tanks. A few blocks away, a Texaco subsidiary also had a storage facility. The companies (now known as ExxonMobil, BP, and Chevron, respectively) pointed fingers at each other; government agencies, sensing that this was not a rumble they wanted to be involved in, did the same.

The Coast Guard, having spent half a million dollars investigating the spill, decided it had done enough; the case was turned over to the state of New York, which wanted no part of it either. Believing that the spill, while regrettable, posed no immediate hazard (no one drank the groundwater anymore, and the manhole-launching explosions had long ago subsided), officials decided not to apply their recently established oil spill fund to what was by far the state's largest oil spill, on the grounds that the spill predated the fund. So the buck was handed down to New York City--which, still reeling from its financial near-meltdown in the 1970s, chose not to do battle with a brace of oil company lawyers. For a decade, nothing happened. And the oil lake quietly grew.

"YOU BECOME something of a stink connoisseur when you live in Greenpoint," says Teresa Toro, who lives two blocks from Newtown Creek. The neighborhood features rows of meticulously kept houses, manicured parks, and carts catering to an influx of ex-Manhattanites, but it also remains the location of choice for projects that would never be placed along Fifth Avenue: sewage treatment, waste transfer, natural gas storage. For Yoro, the oil fumes are the worst. "When the wind is just right, I can smell it blowing off the creek. Sometimes we can't open our windows.

"The [sewage treatment] plant people get very defensive when you call up and complain about the smell," Toro laughs. "They say, 'That's not us! It's the spill!'" But then she turns serious. "Every time I go to the creek, I just get so angry," she says. "I feel like I'm watching a crime in progress."

Local lore holds that it was the Valdez crash that finally shamed the state into action in 1990. "Not at all," says Joseph Lentol, the neighborhood's state assemblyman since 1972. The troth, he says, is worse: In 1988, Mobil had another leak--35,000 gallons--and felt the need to notify the city that, by the way, there happened to be 17 million gallons more underneath. The state's Department of Environmental Conservation began negotiating a consent order forcing Mobil to clean up its mess.