By Jared Ebersole in Video — 24 Jun 2026

The Massive Oil Spill Still Sitting Under Greenpoint

The Greenpoint oil spill was discovered from the air in 1978, but it had been accumulating underground beside Newtown Creek for decades.

One of America's largest oil spills was not a tanker crash or an offshore blowout.

It was a neighborhood.

Under parts of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, petroleum leaked and pooled slowly for decades, spreading through soil and groundwater beside Newtown Creek. It did not arrive in one cinematic disaster. There was no single ship, no famous blackened shoreline, no one-day accident that made the national evening news. That is part of why the Greenpoint oil spill is so disturbing.

It happened quietly.

Where it happened

Greenpoint oil spill area near Newtown Creek and Meeker Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222

Newtown Creek was once a perfect industrial edge. It connected Brooklyn and Queens to the East River, rail lines, refineries, factories, storage tanks, and shipping infrastructure. By the late 19th century, oil refining and petroleum storage had become central to the creek's economy. Standard Oil and its successors were part of that landscape, alongside other companies and industrial operators.

The same conditions that made the area useful also made it vulnerable.

Tanks corroded. Pipes leaked. Transfers spilled. Petroleum products migrated through the ground. Because the spill accumulated over decades, no one stood at the beginning and said: here is the disaster. Residents lived above an environmental problem that was easier to ignore because it was underground.

There were warnings. A 1950 sewer explosion near the area blew manhole covers into the air, and later accounts connect the blast to petroleum vapors. But the true scale was not understood until 1978, when a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter on routine patrol spotted oil flowing into Newtown Creek near Meeker Avenue.

Investigators traced the seep back to a vast underground plume.

Estimates vary, which is important. The original 1979 estimate put the spill at about 17 million gallons. Later studies and advocates have cited figures as high as 30 million gallons. Either way, the spill was larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill, which NOAA describes as roughly 11 million gallons. The Greenpoint spill is often called the largest urban oil spill in North American history.

Cleanup began, but the problem was not as simple as pumping oil from a tank.

The petroleum was mixed through soil and groundwater beneath a dense urban neighborhood, on land with multiple historic operators and complicated ownership. Recovery systems have removed millions of gallons of product, but not everything underground can be recovered like liquid from a barrel. New York State's Greenpoint Petroleum Remediation Project says more than 13.2 million gallons of petroleum product had been recovered through 2024, along with more than 7 billion gallons of treated groundwater.

That is a huge number and still not a clean ending.

The creek itself carries a related but broader burden. Newtown Creek was declared a federal Superfund site in 2010 because of more than a century of pollution from petroleum, heavy metals, solvents, PCBs, sewage overflows, and industrial waste. Its bottom sediment includes what locals and environmental writers call "black mayonnaise": a thick, toxic sludge built from generations of contamination.

The oil spill and the Superfund cleanup are connected in the public imagination because they share the same industrial waterway, but they are not identical projects. The spill is about petroleum beneath Greenpoint and along the creek. The Superfund site is about the contaminated creek system itself. Both show what happens when a working waterfront is treated as a place where waste can disappear.

It never disappeared.

In 2011, EPA reached an agreement with ExxonMobil, BP, Texaco, Phelps Dodge, National Grid, and the City of New York to begin work at the Newtown Creek Superfund site. In January 2025, EPA finalized a cleanup plan for the East Branch portion of the creek. The larger cleanup remains long, technical, and frustratingly slow, with community groups continuing to push for stronger action.

Greenpoint's oil spill is not shocking because oil leaked.

It is shocking because the city kept building above a slow disaster, then spent decades trying to measure, assign, pump, treat, litigate, and explain it. It is environmental damage as a long-term urban condition, not a single accident.

The oil is no longer invisible.

But the cleanup is still catching up to a century of pretending it was.