Distribution of funds for damages in the Exxon Valdez spill ended last year twenty-one years after the spill. Gary Nolting, who represented 2,200 fishermen and was the lead prosecutor in a class action lawsuit saw the 5.3 billion dollar settlement cut to about 1 billion after the suit went all the way to the Supreme Court. At that point 600 of his 2200 clients were dead. Nolting hopes to do better for his clients impacted by the Gulf spill, by keeping them out of court.
The Gulf Coast Claims Facility, administered by Kenneth Fineberg, will be accepting claims through August. Nolting plans to help his clients, primarily in the seafood business, file claims and also provide evidence based on his research that they should be paid more than Feinberg's method of evaluating claims would have paid them.
“It’s certainly an alternative on paper that should provide fishers and other claimants a very good option to get closure financially and emotionally and move on with their lives in a matter of a year or two years instead of 21 years,” Nolting said.
It’s Nolting’s job to translate that “on paper” into currency. BP has paid out more than $4.7 billion in claims through its own process and through the Gulf Coast Claims Facility since the spill started April 20, 2010.
But many business owners and politicians along the Gulf Coast have launched strong protests, insisting that the documentation requirements are onerous, the calculations are arbitrary and the payments are too small.
Feinberg stated in February that businesses would receive double their 2010 losses, minus any emergency payments they had received. Oyster harvesters would receive four times their losses.
Betsy Stanley, who owns S&S Oyster House in Bayou La Batre with her husband, Robert, said that the spill has cost her more than $200,000 in lost revenue. She got an emergency check for $12,000 from the Gulf Coast Claims Facility last year.
She filed for additional relief in November, she said, but hasn’t received any more money.
“They seemed to have pulled numbers out of thin air,” said Stanley, who is one of Nolting’s clients. “They said BP had paid me, they had not. They said I had zero income in 2009. They had me listed as a bakery worker. I’ve been a seafood wholesaler since 1990."
Nolting says that Feinberg's formula is not fair because seafood companies face market changes and suspicion that will take years to change
Stanley, for example, said that she used to sell to several restaurants on the Virginia coast. But when the spill closed Gulf waters, she said she had to shut down, and those restaurants started buying seafood from California and from overseas.
In addition, she said, the disruption to the Gulf supply chain helped send Gulf seafood prices soaring, even as prices elsewhere stayed stable.
Right now, Stanley said, the market price for processed oyster meat is about the same as it costs her to purchase raw Gulf oysters. “We might have to shut back down,” she said. “It’s hard for us to get our foot back in the door.”
Nolting will submit his clients claims by the end of July along with supporting documents from his experts. If his clients accept the subsequent payment he will receive a portion that he says will be "much less" than the 30 per cent lawyers charge
for litigation.
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