Workers await promised BP oil settlements

FORT MYERS, Fla. – Local church leaders who represent underserved workers are fighting to get BP to settle overdue claims from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The workers have not seen any money from claims, church leaders said Wednesday. Those leaders have teamed up with Operation People for Peace to get hundreds of claims in Southwest Florida settled.

The false perception that the BP oil spill reached Southwest Florida shores dramatically devastated the tourism economy, the involved organizations said. The impact was far-reaching, affecting small businesses, churches and hotel workers, local Southern Christian Leadership Conference President Lee Ford said Wednesday.

“The people who worked in these hotels, made those bed, the man who cut the grass and trimmed the hedges, the ones that deal in the hospitality industry in this community — and there’s a lot of them — the service industry, all was impacted,” Ford said.

The claims could help workers who were hit hard by changes to the economy, Pastor Norris Ledbetter said.

“A lot of lives have changed, a lot of jobs have closed. A lot of people have lost their homes, vehicles, etcetera,” he said.

The coalition said hundreds of millions of dollars in economic damages are owed to more than 10,000 different entities.

The chairman of Operation People for Peace, Art Rocker, said BP promised to compensate the many low-income workers affected by the disaster. The claims are legitimate, he said.

“These are claims that BP requested us to do. They are claims that BP told us how to package them and put them together,” Rocker said.

Six years after the oil spill, church leaders said BP needs to settle the claims they requested.

“We still haven’t seen one check or one payment to anybody that put in those claims,” said.

BP failed to respond to requests for comments, but the coalition asks that any person or business requesting a settlement call BP North America.

For more information visit http://operationpeopleforpeace.org/.