Word: state
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...fast, Exxon. While workers were filling planes and buses on the way home, Alaska Governor Steve Cowper and state environment commissioner Dennis Kelso called a press conference in Valdez. They named the "dirty dozen" beaches that they charge are still fouled with oil and announced their own modest $21 million winter cleanup program, at least part of which will be paid for by Exxon. The message to the company was clear: You didn't get the job done, and you're leaving too early...
Alaska, meanwhile, has sued Exxon and the other oil companies that operate in the state for as yet unspecified damages. In a campaign of harassment (financed almost entirely from cleanup funds provided by Exxon), state officials manage to find fault at every turn. Says Steve Provant, a state cleanup coordinator: "I don't think any of the beaches are clean." Recently the state withheld approval for Exxon to use a floating incinerator it had brought to Alaska at a cost of $5 million after initially telling the company that burning was the preferred method of waste disposal...
...state has repeatedly criticized Exxon for failing to contain the oil in the days after it was spilled. But officials are less eager to admit that the state did almost nothing to make sure that the oil industry was prepared for a major accident. Over the past ten years, the staff of the state's oil- pollution-control management program was reduced from three people to one. Says Paul O'Brien, who ran the program until one month before the spill: "There weren't enough resources to do the job right. I was stretched pretty thin." After the accident, environment...
...retrospect, it is clear that the state should have used more of its oil income (an estimated $2 billion a year) to regulate the industry more tightly. Instead, the oil money has flowed into entitlement programs, which pay all Alaska residents an annual stipend of some $800 and senior citizens an additional guaranteed income of $250 a month. Even today Alaska officials bristle at the suggestion that residents who benefit from oil shipments should be made to share some of the burden of safeguarding them...
...large measure he found what he wanted. Florida accounts for around 40% of the sugarcane grown in the U.S., and producers there have been using West Indian cutters for more than 45 years. Mechanical harvesting would be much less expensive, but there are substantial areas in the state where the soil is too fragile to bear the ravages of machinery. So the brunt of cost consciousness falls on the cutters, who invariably take their lumps. They are routinely cheated of some time spent in the fields. They are expected to cut and stack one ton of cane an hour. Those...