10-19-09 by dugan
It’s good news that ExxonMobil lost a big court case today in New York, where a judge ordered it to pay $105 million for contamination of drinking water with a now-banned gasoline additive. The bad news is, in Exxon-world, it’s better to pay $110 million on endless legal delay than admit wrongdoing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company was "disappointed … and evaluating its legal options."
The additive in question, known as MTBE, has been banned nationally since 2004. Oil company scientists knew of its potential to mess up ground water and water wells since at least 1980. Last year, all the other major oil companies settled the product liability case over contamination of six city drinking water wells in Queens, paying $423 million. Only Exxon went to trial, saying it just couldn’t have been Exxon or Mobil gas station tanks that caused the pollution.
The federal jury in New York disagreed.
Exxon engineers knew of MTBE contamination of wells as early as 1980, according to documents unearthed by the Environmental Working Group:
An environmental engineer for ExxonMobil … testified that he learned of MTBE contamination from
Exxon gasoline in 1980, when a tank leak in Jacksonville, Maryland,
fouled wells for a planned subdivision. The ExxonMobil engineer said it
was learned MTBE had also leaked into the subdivision’s wells from a
Gulf and an Amoco station. [View document]
So Exxon is now likely to go hunting for an appeals court. It’s like a mini version of the endless Exxon Valdez liability trial, fought for more than a decade, all the way to the Supreme Court.