Fresh off of Pegasus News. Dallas law firm Baron & Budd have settled out of court with various oil companies for $422 Million.
The firm, a large Democratic donor coincidentally, represented 153 water utilities in 17 states who were suing oil companies for contaminating well water with the chemical MTBE. According to internal documents, oil companies new MTBE, a gasoline additive, was harmful and did not inform the public or government regulators. Subsequently, underground storage tanks leaked the substance into drinking water and rendered it useless. The monetary settlement also includes provisions that the oil companies must pay to clean any future contaminated wells in the next 30 years.
The lawsuit was settled by a laundry list of oil companies: BP Amoco, Atlantic Richfield, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Marathon, Valero, CITGO, Sunoco, Hess, Flint Hills, El Paso Merchant Energy, and Tesoro.
The lone defendant refusing to settle: Exxon Mobil. Or was we like to call it: Satan. Exxon will now face trial in September, just in time for the 2008 election season to be in full swing. What better negative publicity for an oil company than to see gas prices breaking $4 a gallon, and knowingly destroying people's drinking water. We wonder if the GOP will continue sticking up for them in the coming months?
0 comments:
Post a Comment