WASHINGTON - Some of the economic consequences of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill may take years to identify, and BP’s compensation fund should be flexible enough to account for long-term losses, a panel of experts from Alaska’s Exxon Valdez tanker spill told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Some of those damages are difficult to quantify, said Brian O’Neill, a Minnesota attorney who spent two decades shepherding through the court system the lawsuit fishermen and business owners filed against Exxon after its 1989 oil spill in Prince William Sound.

The collapse of the herring fishery, for example, couldn’t be fully anticipated until nearly a decade after 11 million gallons of oil spilled into the sound, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee. And it’s difficult, too, to measure the long-term mental health effects of waiting for two decades for the litigation against the oil giant to be resolved, O’Neill said.

Even while BP works to permanently cap its runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, there are many lessons they can learn from the 1989 oil spill in Alaska, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., who led Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Exxon, she warned, ‘used every legal trick in the book’ to […]

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