Buffalo Naval Park sues insurance company over USS The Sullivans oil spill costs

The Buffalo and Erie County Naval & Military Park, which owns The Sullivans, is suing one of its insurance providers for $3.5 million – plus interest, attorney’s fees and additional expenses.

The park’s lawsuit, filed Monday in State Supreme Court, alleges that the insurance company, Water Quality Insurance Syndicate (WQIS), was supposed to help cover all the costs of cleaning up oil spilled into the Buffalo River when the USS The Sullivans started sinking. Instead, WQIS allegedly stopped covering those cleaning efforts in early May – about three weeks after the warship started taking on water – because the “emergency” phase of the decontamination efforts was over.

“That’s obviously a very significant loss for the client, which is a nonprofit, and relies heavily on donations from one source or another to stay afloat – no pun intended there,” John Kolaga, one of the attorneys for the park, said. “(This) could have a very significant impact on the client if we can’t get this resolved, so we really felt we had no options but to proceed on this claim.”

WQIS did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Buffalo News.

The USS The Sullivans – named for a working-class family that lost five sons during World War II – started leaking oil into the Buffalo River the day it started to sink, according to the lawsuit. The ship had long been plagued by holes in its aging hull, and the park had commissioned temporary repair work that year.

The park was required to clean up the spill under the Clean Water Act and could have been fined upward of $60,000 for every day it didn’t take action. Cleanup crews used an absorbent boom, a solution called “enviroclean,” vacuums and absorbent pads to remove nearly 10.5 tons of oil debris and more than 117,000…