A trip to the mountains of Tennessee, in search of closure on the BP oil spill.

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Transcript

Cold Open

[Music: Lush, dreamy]

John Maas:

I was involved in the spill and I had recurring, the same recurring dream.

Dan Leone (host):
I’d love for you to tell me what the dream is, if you could. If you can remember it. 

John Maas:
Unfortunately, I can. Um, too vividly. Um. My dream really doesn't make sense to me, but I keep having a dream about being in the boat I built in my backyard being in the oil. I didn't build that boat for three years after the spill, you know, but that boat kept sinking in the oil and that would bother me a lot.

Dan:
And do you go under the water, and then that's what’s –

John Maas:
No, I never go under the water. 

Dan:
Okay. You just feel you're sinking and then…

John Maas:
When the boat's down at a list and the stern's going under, I wake up every single time, and it, and it would set a panic attack. Because of not being able to breathe. Have to get up, spend four hours in the living room watching TV or something, try to take my mind off it, and then try to go back to bed.
 

I had to seek therapy. I had to be sedated. I got diagnosed with PTSD. Um, it, it, it sucks. 

From Western Sound and APM Studios, I’m Dan Leone.

This is Ripple.

I live in the mountains, but I’d been in the Gulf for so long I forgot how striking the scenery can be. 

Dan:

Woah...okay. This man genuinely lives on top of a mountain.

I was in Tennessee, the last stop before my trip was done. I was searching for the home of a guy named John Maas.

Dan:

I think this is it. 

Out of all the roughly 5,000 cleanup workers and coastal residents who individually sued BP for their deteriorating health, John Maas is, to the best of my knowledge, the only one who somehow got money out of 'em.

[Beeping]

Dan:

Is this 505? …Hey John, how are you doing, man?

John Maas:
I'm fine. 

Dan:
You used to live in Louisiana?

John Maas:
Mississippi.

Dan:

Mississippi.

John Maas:

And Louisiana.

Dan:

And Louisiana. You're about as far away as you can get from there up here, huh?

John Maas:
That was the plan.

Dan:
Yeah?

As far as mountain views go, John Maas’ backyard is like a fantasy matte painting in an old Disney flick. It’s ridiculous.

Dan:

Um, you know what – can you talk to me about your view, please?

John Maas:

It's absolutely beautiful. What you're looking at is about 45 miles of valley view. The Calfkiller River is down in the bottom. We're 1900 feet up.

We have chickens. We got bears and goats and bobcats and, just everything. 

To keep the Disney metaphor going, John Maas himself is kind of like a fairytale princess in that everywhere he walks, one of his animals is close by – following him around all chipper like.

Dan:
Two big dogs.

John Maas:
Oh yeah. We got big dogs everywhere. Bloodhounds. 

[chain clinks; talking to dogs] There Rowdy Rowdy. Good boy. 

I've been herding dogs for a while. [Dan laughs] I'm gettin’ good at it. 

I got unpacked in John’s barn, which he converted into an Airbnb. This is where I was going to sleep.

Each day, I’d wake up, walk the rocky path over to John’s house, sit down at his kitchen island, and we’d start talking. We’d stay in his kitchen past sundown, the conversations lasting right up 'til midnight. I wound up staying in Tennessee for three days.

I needed to understand how John Maas got a settlement. I’d spoken to a lawyer who was candid about how invincible BP seemed in all this. I’d spoken to cleanup workers with pending cases who spoke as though their dismissal was a foregone conclusion.

And yet, somehow, John Maas won.

As he and I spoke, I was keeping tabs in my head. I couldn’t really help it. Each part of John’s story had something about it that might have contributed to his legal victory over one of the most powerful corporations in the world.

Part 1. Education

Dan:

First of all, okay, so we know who your opponent was. We know who BP is. They are a very, very large company with a lot of resources. Who were they going up against in you? 

John Maas:
Well, um, I'm the hammer. I'm not the nail. I don't get shit on. I don't put up with it. I won't tolerate it. And…

Dan:
Were you ever the nail?

John Maas:
Yeah, when I was about 14 maybe, or 13. My mom and dad made me a ward of the state because of my ADHD and emotional problems and things like that. And it wasn't the hardest thing to accept. Except for I had a sister and three brothers and they kept all them. Sort of made you feel like shit, you know? They put me in a, a foster home program. I ended up in the south side of Chicago in some shitty foster home, and I remember going out to the fire escape and not weighing enough to make it go down to the sidewalk. So I had to jump like 15 feet down.

This was around 1977. John says he left Chicago and hitchhiked down to Louisiana. He worked on an oil rig. And then –

John Maas:

When I was 16, I got arrested for stealing a cop's motorcycle.

Dan:
Why did you steal a cop's motorcycle?

John Maas:
I was hitchhiking on this one spot for like four days and nobody would pick me up. They were driving by and I could – 

Dan:
Couldn’t you grab someone else’s motorcycle?

John Maas:
Well, I didn't realize it was a cop's motorcycle. 

Dan:

Oh, I see. 

John Maas:

It wasn't a police motorcycle. 

Dan:

Oh, okay…

John Maas:

It was a cop's motorcycle. [laughs]

Dan:
A police officer's personal motorcycle.

John Maas:
Yes, yes, yes.

Dan:
That must've been even better. 

John Maas:
It wasn't very fast, um, [laughter] but I got caught runnin’ through a field, um, and it, and it failed on me. But they extradited me to Illinois. They put me in front of a judge. The judge said, “I want to see enlistment papers in a couple of weeks, or I'm going to put you in jail.” So, uh, I joined the Marines and um, I was sent off to San Diego to bootcamp.

And um, while I was in bootcamp, I had to race up Mount Motherfucker with our platoon flag against three other Marines. There was four platoons in our company, and –

Dan:
What was Mount Motherfucker?

John Maas:
It was just like it sounds. It was this big mountain in San Diego that you had to climb up and if you were to slide back down, you'd know where the motherfucker part came in. [laughs] It was straight down. And um, anybody that's been there will know this is right. You start slow and you finish slow. Don't, don’t run up there that first halfway. Don't, don’t try. [laughs] Cause you’ll never make it.

Part 2. Pressure

Dan:
How did you find the VOO program?

John Maas:

Lisa found it all. Lisa Bridwell, my girlfriend for 11 years at the time, had a blog called Bumpkin on a Swing. And, and her little fashion blog, all those girls got together and started talking about the oil spill, and they turned Lisa onto the VOO program and Lisa applied for the VOO for me. And the reason she did it was – for my birthday, she gave me a colonoscopy and a, and she paid for captain school for me.

John had his captain's license and he was getting ready to start a charter fishing business in the spring of 2010, but when the spill hit, that plan was derailed.

John Maas:

BP was my first and last charter. They actually are the only ones that actually chartered my boat.

While working on the cleanup, John was dismayed by what he calls “incompetence at the highest level.” 

John Maas:

We all watched, um, their experimental attempt to stop the well fail. We saw their junk shots fail. We saw one catastrophe after another. 

But on the plus side, he was being paid $1,600 a day – more money than he’d ever made in his life. 

John Maas:

Lisa called me and she said, “I can't believe it. They wired, oh, 27 or what – a thousand dollars into the account.” And I said, “Really?” And uh, I went and uh, cashed a check and took her out and bought her a new car. And um, she complained that the new car gave her a back ache. And she went in to the doctor with a back ache and… I actually have her daytimer here somewhere. [laughs]

Dan:
Her daytimer? Is this 2010 or?

John Maas:
Yeah. Oh yeah. This is June 2010. 

Dan:

Okay. 

John Maas:
Where's July? [turning pages] July 15th. Here it is. There's her first entry. And she went in on the 15th for the first time. So between here and August 8th, she went to the hospital, was diagnosed with cancer for the first time in her life. And she died on August 8th.

Dan:
You know, I think this is the only death certificate I've ever physically touched. Uterine cancer and respiratory failure.

John Maas:
They never sourced it, because it was from her brain to her uterus throughout her intestines, liver, kidneys, lungs. Everywhere.

Dan:
Okay. So my, I guess my question is, do you believe that there was some kind of a connection?

John Maas:
Absolutely. 

Dan:

You do?

John Maas:

Yes, I do.

Dan:
Okay. She wasn't out there on the cleanup with you?

John Maas:
No. She was in my boat every night, cleaning the boat, cleaning my clothes, cleaning the cooler, making us lunch. She had direct contact with no PPEs, with dispersed oil.

John says Lisa wasn't complaining of illness prior to this diagnosis. But, she was a smoker. 

Dan:
So I guess that um, you know, if you ever went in front of, well, if you ever had, the assumption would be that Lisa got the cancer from smoking. That's probably what everyone would tell you.

John Maas:
You know, without, without an autopsy, um, your guess as good as mine. 

Dan:

Yeah.

John Maas:

And um, if I had to do again, I would've given Lisa an autopsy. My personal feelings are, uh, unfounded. I have no basis, uh, other than what I've read and what I've seen. 

When John says “what I’ve seen,” he’s partly referring to what happened in the months after Lisa died. See, after a day's work on the VOO program, he'd park his boat in the driveway, and his five dogs would run around and play under his boat.

John Maas:

And it started with uh, about six months after the spill, a big lab named Ears, uh, started havin’ seizures. And I took him to the vet several times in Ocean Springs, and they couldn't really tell me what was wrong with him. And uh, the seizures got so bad I had to put him down. And he was about five years old or four years old. And then my American bulldog, who was just a couple years old at the time, Jibs, he uh, he got a giant tumor in his neck – as big as a hard league baseball. And uh, then my four year old bullmastiff died. He got a tumor that grew on his spine, and he couldn't walk anymore. And I had to have him put down. And, and I'm an animal rescue person. I've been dealing with dogs for my whole life. And I've never had a series of bad luck like that with dogs. Um, never before or never since.

Dan:
With regard to Lisa, um, I’ll just, I'll just ask it. Um, do you blame yourself in any way for what happened to her?

John Maas:
You know, that’s a, that's a hard question to answer, because even though there is some blame as far as me goin’ out and gettin’ that job and me bringin’ that stuff home to our driveway and, and me being…no, I, I, I don't blame myself. After years of retrospect, I blame the misleading statements by catastrophe mitigation professionals in the spill. I mean, we, we were lied to. We…we were all lied to. 

Part 3. Distrust

As you’re listening to John Maas speak, it might be difficult to tell that he has a lung function 40% of what it should be.

He keeps an inhaler in the front pocket of his t-shirt. He’s got oxygen tanks he has to bring with him when he goes on trips.

John Maas claims that he was sprayed directly, from aircraft, with Corexit. He decided to sue BP for the impact his condition has had on his life. 

Like many others, John sought legal representation. 

John Maas: 

By no means do I think I'm a lawyer. By no means do I think I can walk in and, and beat BP's counsel in a federal court. Uh, you know, I’m not an attorney, and um, I needed representation on this. 

When we broached the topic of Gulf Coast law firms – some of which represented John for a time – he launched into a tirade. 

John Maas:

So uh, I called the bar association and looked for um, lawyers in Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama. They didn't want my case. 

I’m just gonna summarize John’s position for you – things didn’t work out between him and his lawyers. And he doesn’t trust a single firm on the Gulf Coast.

John Maas:
I was forced to represent myself pro se. 

Pro se is latin for “self” or “in one’s own behalf.” John found himself in the position of taking on British Petroleum all alone, and prepared for the fight of his life. 

More with John Maas after this – we’ll be right back.

[Break]

We reached out to BP, requesting comment on some statements made by John Maas in this episode. BP didn’t respond. 

[Music transition]

Dan:
[laughs] I just came into John's house and he's carrying a stack of – how many pieces of paper is this?

John Maas:
4,658.

Dan:
Okay. 4,658 pieces of paper. And…what is this? 

John Maas:
This is BP's initial response to the plaintiff in the BELO process.

When John says plaintiff, he’s referring to himself. When he says BELO, he’s referring to the process under which he was suing BP. His case was being heard in the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Since he was representing himself pro se, John filed a request for discovery documents from BP.  

John Maas:
I requested all employment records, duties and job descriptions of myself, the names of all VOO task force members, all decon records… (dip under) 

John was reading off of a legal pad, and he just kept going and going.

John Maas:

(rise up)...all data in regards to Corexit and dawn dish soap…(dip under)

He listed his discovery demands for a full five minutes and seven seconds before I stopped him. 

John Maas:

(rise up)...any and all communications between Admiral Thad Allen, the Incident Commander, US Coast Guard, and –

Dan:
I’m not going to make you read this whole thing. 

John Maas:
Okay. 

Dan:
And they responded to you by sending –

John Maas:
Sending me 4,658 pages that say non-responsive on each and every page. You can take any one of these files…

We flipped through thousands of pages. The bottom of each had small text that read “Confidential - BP JS Maas.” But the content of each page was completely redacted.

It was just thousands of sheets of paper with large bold text that read “Non-Responsive.”

John Maas:

They have 4,658 pages of documents pertaining to me. But they would not release any information on any of those documents. They killed a few trees for nothing there, didn't they? [laughs] That's a shame. [coughs]

If BP’s lawyers had intended to discourage John with this move – it backfired. 

Part 4. Pugilism

John Maas:

They're not the hammer in this. I am. They'll, they’ll never be the hammer in this. [laughs] Ever. 

Dan:
That didn't scare you? That didn't intimidate you? 

John Maas:
That didn’t – you got to be kiddin’. That was a joke. It was –

Dan:
You laughed?

John Maas:
I did. Didn't you find it funny? It was funny. For, for a professional legal firm like that to respond to discovery in such a fashion is insulting. It's belittling. They're trying to intimidate you. They're trying to bury you in paperwork, and, and the one part that wasn't funny was looking through every page to see if there was somethin’ they hid in there. 

In the entire stack of papers, there was one single document that was not redacted. 

John Maas:
One fuel receipt for $60 in the Vessel of Opportunity program was in there. 

And, and that was intentional by BP…

John doesn’t believe the inclusion of the fuel receipt was a mistake.

He thinks BP wanted him to know for sure that they had information on him, but not let him know what the extent of that information was.

John, in contrast, wanted BP to know what he had.

John Maas:

We were playin’ tit for tat. 

John gestured to another tower of papers on his kitchen island.

John Maas:

That's the stack I sent them.

Dan:
Ah, okay. So you sent them your own stack.

John Maas:
Oh, oh, oh, I stacked them up. 

Here’s an important thing to know about John Maas – he’s a packrat.

John Maas:
You've been interviewing people a long time. I bet you haven't seen anybody with half of this shit.

He's a big believer in the philosophy: document everything.

John Maas:
I have every check stub. I have every pay stub. I have every medical record. I have everything. 

He kept a detailed, organized catalog of his time in the VOO program. Including proofs of purchase for PPE.

John Maas:

These are the actual receipts.

Dan:
Oh, you literally have the receipts. 

John Maas:
Yes. I literally have the receipts. 

Dan:

[laughs] Okay.

John Maas:

Every one of them.

John sent these things over to BP’s attorneys in part to send the message that he was ready for them.

Dan:
What have your interactions with BP's lawyers been like? Like, what are they like?

John Maas:
They're arrogant pricks. Nothin’ short of arrogant pricks.

Everybody thinks these lawyers are brilliant scholars and oh, they're so smart. They're not. They put their pants on just like we do. They make mistakes just like we do. They have acquired this arrogance, because they had just steamrolled 4,500 cases in front of mine. But what they didn't realize, is I followed every single one of those cases and I watched how every single one of those cases failed, and I didn't make the same mistake.

Part 5. Outside the Box

There’s this website called Pacer – it provides public access to electronic court records. John scoured the site for years, studying cases BP had been involved in to try and understand their legal strategies.

John Maas:

This might sound crazy, but if you wanna seek justice and you really want justice, get off your ass and research your subject. Put in the time.
 

John paid particular attention to a giant class action lawsuit BP faced in the aftermath of the spill. And he noted this dispute between BP and the class action plaintiffs' lawyers over the interpretation of the word "manifested." How that word was interpreted had implications over the number of people who would be included in the settlement. And BP's lawyers won that argument. The judge ruled in BP's favor.     

So John didn't want to lose to what he saw as wordplay. And considering he was representing himself, that was a possibility. 

John Maas:

I requested the Hudson method be used in my case.

So John cited a legal precedent from Hudson V. Hardy,  a 1968 DC Circuit case, and he argued that since he was pro se, any motions put forth by BP had to be clearly explained to him in layman's terms.

John Maas:
They can't use any legal mumbo jumbo bullshit to sneak by me. They have to talk to me man to man. They have to tell me exactly what they're looking for and exactly what they want. They can't trick me with terms that are over my head.

John didn’t pretend to be a lawyer. He was pro se, and he wanted the case to proceed on those terms as much as possible. To turn self-representation from a weakness into an advantage.

He filed motions against BP for anything that seemed suspect – no matter how slight.

John Maas:

Here’s a, this is a page –

Dan:
This is handwritten.

John Maas:
Oh yes. These, all my motions are handwritten. All my, everything I do is handwritten. I don't know how to electronically file anything. I have a flip phone.

That was the moment I realized that the stack of notepads in front of me with scratchy handwriting were full of John's legal motions.

John Maas:

I went through thousands of pens –

Dan:

Did this – sorry to derail you, but did all these hand, I mean this is, this is like 40 pages of handwritten – 

John Maas:
It is a 40 page handwritten complaint to the bar association – 

Dan:
Did anyone ever complain about you using handwritten notes? Was this ever brought up?

John Maas:
As a matter of fact, to the contrary. Um, the clerks of court who you would expect to be offended the most, were the most supportive of me of anybody. So, you know, I just kept plowing on and plowing on and plowing on. And I went through so many ink pens. I went through so many stamps, boxes of envelopes. 

John was navigating the legal system to the best of his ability – mainly by just Googling everything – and he hadn’t been crushed by BP yet. 

But there was one fight he saw as essential to his chances. John filed a motion for a change of venue – he wanted his case OUT of Louisiana. A jurisdiction he had grown to distrust, and a jurisdiction that was far from his home and from the doctors who were supporting him.

John Maas:

I live 550 miles from the Eastern District Court. My truck is a 1970 Dodge that gets seven miles a gallon. 

Submitting written motions was one thing – but in the process of arguing for a change of venue, John would have to argue his motion orally. This means he would have to speak in front of the judge and plead his case.

And staying focused in court was at times a challenge for John.  

John Maas:

Mental health issues are, are somewhat um… people are afraid to talk about 'em. I'm not. Um, it doesn't make you stupid or less a man or anything else. It just, what's stupid is not to address it, you know, not to confront it. 

So John confronted it, and over the years, he came up with a strategy for court appearances.  

John Maas:
A sedative helps when I go to court. I generally take a, a, an Ambien, or I take some type of a sedative so that I can stay more focused. And um, that's how I roll when I go to court. [laughs]

John prepared and delivered his motion to move his case to Tennessee.

John Maas:
My motion for venue was extremely clear, and I made it clear that convenience to the courts do not outweigh witness testimony in trials. And witness testimony is the most important thing. Uh, my diagnosis was in Tennessee. My witnesses are in Tennessee. My doctors are in Tennessee. Everything's in Tennessee.

BP's lawyers pushed back on the change of venue; they pointed out that no BELO case had ever been seen in Tennessee, whereas hundreds of BELO cases had been tried in the Gulf states. But after a somewhat testy back and forth with the judge that left the issue unresolved in court … BP eventually conceded.

John Maas:

My case was hurriedly transferred to Tennessee.

It's unclear how, exactly, this happened. Why BP agreed to this change of venue. Maybe John's motion was really that ironclad and well argued. It's not clear. But regardless of the why – John took this as a victory for him.   

John Maas:
When you beat, uh, experienced attorneys and you're like me, it gives you a little confidence, you know. Um, that's like me goin’ in and beatin’ LeBron James in a one-on-one game, you know. [laughs] Highly unlikely. 

We're gonna take a break. And after that – the case continues. We'll be right back.

[Break]

John Maas had successfully gotten his case transferred out of Louisiana.

John Maas:
The man with the gold makes the golden rules, [laughs] and they don't have any gold in Tennessee. We had no pony in the race up here. It was just a matter of law.

But the change of venue was a double-edged sword. On one side, his case gained a new momentum and was finally moving forward. On the other side, John was struggling to keep up.

John Maas:

I would've considered it a complete failure if I, if I woulda had my case dismissed with prejudice, um –

Dan:
Was your case at risk of being dismissed with prejudice?

John Maas:
Yes. [laughs] Oh yeah. Oh yeah, all the time. Oh yeah.

Dan:
How come?

John Maas:
Because I was runnin’ it, probably, but, um, it was because of deadlines. 

I worked extremely hard to make everything happen on the required date or before, and I was successful for 12 years doin’ that. Um, I was so stressed out on trying to give my case CPR and keep it alive, that it became a nuisance to our relationship. Me and Aleta.

When we were first making contact with John Maas, we were speaking to him through the email address of his wife, Aleta. John doesn't have an email address... he's got an analog approach to communication.

John’s lawsuit had stretched on for years. And for many of those years, Aleta had been along for the ride.

Part 6. Trust

John Maas:

I'm sure I'm a hard guy to live with, but in a stressful situation, [laughs] I've got to be much harder. Um, I took a room and I turned it into an office. Uh, I appointed Aleta as my secretary. She was runnin’ to the post office and mailin’ things and doin’ the printer. And she has a smartphone, she handled all the emails and texts.

A decade of John’s rabble-rousing had taken its toll on both of them. 

John Maas:
I, I, I  wasn't gonna let my relationship with Aleta go south over this case. BP already took so much from me. They ain't taking that too.

Aleta and John agreed that John needed help getting the case over the finish line. Despite John's negative experiences with lawyers in the past, he needed representation. But finding a lawyer in Tennessee with the appropriate expertise was a problem.

John Maas:

I looked up maritime attorneys in Tennessee. There's three of 'em.

He made calls and set up interviews.

John Maas:

Divine intervention. You call it whatever you want. But we were sittin’ on that deck right there in that chair, Aleta had her little smartphone, and we were on a Zoom meeting with, uh, Ken Berger. And I promised her that if Ken didn't take the case, it, I was done.

Ken Burger is an attorney based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

John Maas:

He interviewed me. He told me that he was a lawyer with a average IQ. The only thing that he's got is a work ethic, and he will work this case, and he'll win my case. And I thought, “well, hell, that sounds great.” And, uh, Ken took the case.

Dan:
How did he feel about your work, the work that you had done up to that point?

John Maas:
He, he thought it was, um, effectively crude.

John and Ken were in this precarious part of the legal process. They were being confronted with the same attacks that had gotten so many cases before theirs dismissed. BP’s expert witnesses were zeroing in on John’s health.

John Maas:

Each one formed an opinion of me and my health situation, and none of 'em have ever met me or examined me.

Dan:
And what was their opinion about your health situation?

John Maas:
[coughs] Um, they blamed everything but Corexit.

BP questioned whether John's asthma was caused by him being overweight.

John was obligated to demonstrate the specific causation of his condition – same as all the other plaintiffs. And although John's doctor gave a deposition saying the most probable cause was chemical exposure, BP’s experts were saying that John didn't have enough to prove the link.

As part of their argument, BP's experts cited data – the same data that keeps popping up in this series. The data collected by contractors hired by BP to monitor the safety of the cleanup.

John Maas:

They were going to use BP's post spill data on air quality, water quality, all that crap.

So John and Ken were at a precipice – the place where so many others had failed and fallen. If they wanted to win, they had to contend with BP’s expert witnesses, and BP’s data.

And the two of them came up with this unique plan to do just that.

Part 7. Common Sense

John Maas:

BP struggled with the approach Ken put on 'em. Ken beat 'em... with a stick when he told the judge that, uh, we motioned to exclude their expert witnesses in the case.

Dan:
And using what logic did Ken and yourself motion to dismiss their, their expert witnesses? Why did you motion to dismiss them?

John Maas:
Because BP pled guilty to obstruction of Congress and pled guilty to falsifying post spill data that their expert witnesses who relied on BP's data to form their opinion, they were forming an opinion based on untrustworthy data. There's no data BP can produce from the BP oil spill that would be trustworthy in a court of law.

John and Ken didn't try to disprove BP's data. Instead, they motioned to exclude BP’s data – to just throw it all out – and to exclude BP's expert witnesses from the case. To exclude all of them.

They justified their motion by calling attention to basic facts about BP’s behavior since April 20th, 2010. They pointed out that with regard to the oil spill, BP is criminal. BP also pled guilty to lying. It pled guilty to misrepresenting data to Congress.

So John and Ken argued, why should BP be allowed to submit any of its data pertaining to the oil spill into a court of law? And why should it be afforded the legal presumption that this data is accurate or complete when BP is a confessed liar?  

Dan:
Was the judge receptive to the idea of your motion? 

John Maas:
Very much. 

Dan:

Okay, okay.

John Maas:

Oh, extremely. Extremely. The judge was not a friend of BP.

BP had attempted to do what it successfully did so many times in the Gulf Coast – to have the opinion of John’s doctors thrown out, to say that John didn't have enough to prove specific causation. But this time, the judge rejected BP's motion.

John Maas:
BP tried to exclude our expert witnesses in their summary judgment, and their failure to exclude our expert witnesses opened the door for a trial.

After these developments, John says their mediations took on a different tenor. BP’s lawyers now seemed open to settling. 

John Maas:
BP came and said, “Well, if you'll drop all the charges or drop the case with prejudice, we won't bill you for all our attorneys fees.” And uh, I told the mediator, I said, “Can you go back there and ask them to kiss my ass?” [laughs] And I said, “Well, tell 'em all to get fucked. I'm gonna go home and feed my chickens.” And uh, I got up and left. 

In their final mediation, it all came to a head. 

John Maas:

I cussed 'em out, um, because they told me any money over a certain figure had to be approved by London. And they did that about one o'clock-ish, you know. And uh, at four o'clock, they came back and told me they had it approved.

When John says BP’s lawyers got the figure approved, that was the amount of money he had agreed to settle for. He won. After years and years of fighting, he got a settlement out of this giant corporation.

John Maas:

I told them from the beginning I was gonna kick their ass, and at the end I did just that.

John Maas oscillates between bravado and humility, between self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation.

But he’s under no illusions about the last condition that almost certainly contributed to his success.

Part 8. Luck

Dan:

I'm wondering how much of your victory you attribute to not being in Louisiana or Mississippi. How, how critical was that change of venue?

John Maas:
I would've fallen like the rest if I'd have stayed down there. Um, the only thing that saved me, the middle district of Tennessee, Judge Waverly Crenshaw.

As far as personally where I am and how things are. Well, you’re, you're stayin’ in my Airbnb on top of a mountain overlooking 50 miles of valley, and you can't see a house from my house, can you? It's wonderful. I'm in heaven on earth. Um, I live in a place people dream about and people come to my house to go on vacation. I lost Lisa, but I found Aleta.

John had laid a framed portrait of Lisa against the couch in his living room.

John Maas:
I brought a picture of Lisa out and sat it down and – 

Dan:
Yeah, yeah, I’m looking at it now – 

John Maas:
She was as sweet as could be, and I had, I had that picture out in the she shed collecting dust, and uh, you don't hang a picture of your ex on the wall in your home, um, but Aleta is so cool. She saw that picture out in the she shed and she cleaned it up, brought it in, and hung it on the wall. So life is good. My dogs are healthy. I do animal rescue on a daily basis up here. I've always helped people and helped animals, and I believe in karma, and uh, I'm one of those guys that believe when you die, you go to the Rainbow Bridge and every animal you met in your life decides your fate. I got it made. Life, life's good.

That night, I thought I maybe sensed closure in John. 

[Music transitions]

Dan:

All right. Where are we walkin’ into right now?

John Maas:
We're going into the, to the main part of the barn…(dip under)

The next morning, right before I left John’s place in Tennessee, I just wanted to check a quick thing.

In our conversation, he said he had 50,000 more documents in a filing cabinet in his barn. I just wanted to see if that was true.

John Maas:

Um, and there's 50,000 pages of documents. It just goes on and on and on and on. [trying to open filing cabinet] Come on baby. [unclear] jammed me up, huh?

One of the filing cabinet drawers was stuck, and wouldn’t open. John got angry.

[Scene: John slams the door, trying to get it open, over and over]

He bent the metal frame to get it open.

Then he stood up, out of breath. Defiant. The closure I maybe sensed the night before, completely gone.

John Maas:

It exists. I hang on to everything. I have never thrown a document away pertaining to my BP case, and, and I won't, because I'm not done. Um, I'm going to, uh, pursue the federal government's involvement in my illness, and uh, I am going to try to make them pay for shortenin’ my life. They, uh, were instrumental in that effort. They were corrupt, they were misleading, they were in cahoots with BP. And I intend to prove just that.

[Sound Design: transition]

Epilogue

[Sound Design/Score: a woman humming the syllable “voo”]

My wife has this ritual when she can’t sleep.

She pats her chest, deep breathes. When she exhales, she hums a syllable in as low a register as she can. It’s called VOO Breathing. Saying VOO out loud is meant to resonate in your body  and calm you down.

[Sound Design/Score: Voo]

Before I left for the Gulf, hearing her make that sound would calm me down too.

When I got back from my trip, it didn’t anymore. 

[Sound Design moment transitions]

This new version of the Deepwater Horizon story had replaced the inaccurate one in my mind. And I started wondering – how many other stories am I mis-remembering?

The ending of this version of the Deepwater Horizon story wasn't really up to me – it was up to the EPA.

They'd been successfully sued by a lawyer named Claudia Polsky on behalf of marine toxicologist Riki Ott and other clients. A judge told the EPA they had until May 31st, 2023 to update the country’s National Contingency Plan – an obscure, but critical policy that lays out guidelines for responding to toxic spills, including the use of dispersants.

As you may remember, the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon was regulated by a National Contingency Plan that hadn’t been updated since 1994.

At the end of May – it didn’t make much of a stir in the news – but the EPA issued their new guidelines.

I called up Claudia Polsky to get her reaction. 

Claudia Polsky:
It's unquestionably a vast improvement on the 1994 National Contingency Plan that preceded it.

And… she was pretty damn happy. 

Claudia Polsky:

So for example, one thing that was a huge issue in Deepwater Horizon was victims' inability to know the precise chemicals to which they had been exposed. And, under the new rule, companies manufacturing dispersants have to disclose every single ingredient in each of their dispersant products. And so that's a big win.

And the EPA went even further.

Claudia Polsky:

Another thing is that there is more pre-market toxicity testing of these products required before they can be added to so-called Schedule J, which is essentially the list of things potentially available for oil spill response. And one of the additional forms of testing that is required, which is super important in reducing exposure, is efficacy testing. Because our clients contend that even leaving aside the health and ecosystem costs of these chemicals, dispersants very often just don't work.

So now, companies need to run more stringent testing to demonstrate that their products even work. And there’s another type of test that they’re now required to do, which is seriously relevant to everything you’ve heard in this series.

Companies are now required to test the toxicity of their dispersants in combination with crude oil. The mixture is now under scrutiny, not just the dispersant.

Claudia Polsky:

So all of those things are, are positives.

Another big win for Claudia and her clients is that every single dispersant currently approved for use in the United States must pass these new toxicity and efficacy tests – or, they’ll be removed from the list.

Which brings me… to Corexit.

Corexit currently remains on the Schedule J list and will presumably be subjected to additional testing. 

But there was another component of the EPA’s decision which involves who exactly is in charge in the aftermath of a toxic spill.

Claudia Polsky:

One mixed bag feature that, you know, causes some different viewpoints among our client coalition is that the rule provides for more local input into whether and which dispersants will be used to respond to a given spill. And for clients that have more faith in the local response teams, that's a good thing because those folks are closer to the ground and our clients trust them to make nuanced decisions. In the Gulf Coast, our clients are concerned that local input will not mean an additional layer of safety screening. They think there's just gonna be a blank check to the oil industry, and they wish that EPA would set more rules federally that would further restrict dispersant use on a nationwide basis.

This stuck out to me. Under the EPA's new rule, more local input could mean more safety oversight, but it could also mean less, depending on who is giving the input and where the chemical incident occurs. 

Claudia Polsky:
It puts a pretty heavy burden on citizens because they have to engage with lots of local decision making processes rather than just offering their input on a federal rule.
But zooming out, this is a real step forward. Our clients accordingly decided not to sue EPA over the final rule.

If Claudia and her clients were dissatisfied with the EPA’s updated guidelines, they could have sued them again, but they’ve decided that these rules are strong enough. And so they’ll keep a close eye on how they’re implemented, but for now, they’ll let the new National Contingency Plan be the law of the land.

But that said, I can’t in good conscience report that this new EPA rule is enough to protect you.

Chemical incidents aren't a rare thing in the United States. How prevalent they are exactly differs depending on who you ask.

But if you live in the vicinity of a chemical spill, it might feel like an echo of what happened post-Deepwater – you might be told by local officials that the air is safe, that the water is safe, that you’re safe. Someone might offer you money to help clean up the mess. You’re gonna have to make a choice, to do what you feel is best for you and your family.

My dad worked a lot of hours when I was young, and I always wondered what he was doing out there in that big wide world. It turns out he was working his ass off on construction sites, exposing himself to all kinds of things that may or may not have given him cancer in his 60s.

So I’m gonna leave you with the same message I wish I knew to say to my father, when I was a child, and he came home smelling of germs and placed the only pair of shoes he could afford in the basement, to protect me.

Take care of yourself. 

[Credits]