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Major environmental crises have disastrous effects on political visibility of the firms involved. Loss of life and social or external costs derived from such disasters attract public attention to those firms. Government may be induced to discipline managers by forcing them to incur costs to clean up and reduce the risk of accident. This paper uses the political costs related to 10 major environmental crises and a model similar to Jones 1991, Cahan 1992, and DeAngelo et al. 1994 to conduct on a longitudinal and cross-sectional basis an empirical test of the political-cost hypothesis where size is replaced by occurrence of an environmental crisis. The signs of all variables in the model match the predicted sign and are significant except for the proxy for environmental crises.