Citations:spillionaire

Noun: "a person who acquires a substantial amount of money by being paid to participate in the cleanup of an oil spill"

 * 1990 — Art Davidson, In the Wake of the Exxon Valdez: The Devastating Impact of the Alaska Oil Spill, Sierra Club Books (1990), ISBN 9780871566140, page xv:
 * To some, the spill becomes another gold rush: the spillionaires, as they come [sic] to be called, find they can make big money from Exxon's cleanup efforts.
 * 1993 — Janet Trowbridge Bohlen, For the Wild Places: Profiles in Conservation, Island Press (1993), ISBN 1559631252, page 149:
 * "Spillionaires" made as much as half a million dollars that spring operating cleanup boats.
 * 1994 — Christopher L. Dyer & James R. McGoodwin, Folk Management in the World's Fisheries: Lessons for Modern Fisheries Management, University Press of Colorado (1994), ISBN 9780870813252, page 225:
 * People were cast as being greedy or labelled as "Exxon whores" or "spillionaires" as a result of their participation in the cleanup effort.
 * 1999 — John Keeble, Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, Eastern Washington University Press (1999), ISBN 9780910055536, page 180:
 * The quick, the rapacious, and the well-equipped had the advantage and became what were known as spillionaires. Outsiders arrived.
 * 1999 — Harold A. Linstone, Decision Making for Technology Executives: Using Multiple Perspectives to Improve Performance, Artech House (1999), ISBN 9780890064030, page 178:
 * The lavish clean-up effort poured large sums of money into the fishing villages, for example, $53 million worth of purchases and salaries into Valdez, a town of 3500 population. Local "spillionaires" were created while the influx of transients created problems ranging from crime to sewage.
 * 2010 — Charles Wohlforth, The Fate of Nature: Rediscovering Our Ability to Rescue the Earth, Thomas Dunne Books (2010), ISBN 9780312377373, page 289:
 * As boats stayed out for weeks and months, often with hardly anything to do, life-changing sums of money accumulated; owners of big boats, or of more than one, became spillionaires.
 * 2010 — Dan Barry, "After Oil Spill Crisis, a Protector Keeps Watch", The New York Times, 20 December 2010:
 * The marina's manager, Chris Calloway, says that the only obvious evidence of the oil spill now are the new trucks and boats owned by the "spillionaires" — people who struck it rich by renting out their boats and land and services for BP's cleanup operation that lasted months.
 * 2011 — David Gessner, The Tarball Chronicles: A Journey Beyond the Oiled Pelican and into the Heart of the Gulf Oil Spill, Milkweed Editions (2011), ISBN 9781571313331, page 20:
 * A few of the boat owners have managed to get rich by earning a couple grand or so a day to have their boats sit idle, as backups, giving birth to another new local term: "spillionaire."
 * 2011 — Sara Wheeler, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2011), ISBN 9780374200138, pages 68:
 * Private contractors working on the cleanup became known as spillionaires.