Amazon pollution case may cost billions

Chevron could be found liable for toxic dumping

December 21, 2008|Frank Bajak, Associated Press

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador - When the sun beats particularly hot on this land in the middle of the jungle, the roads sweat petroleum.

A Rhode Island-sized expanse of what was once pristine Amazon rainforest is crisscrossed with oil wells and pipeline grids built by Texaco Inc. a generation ago. And for the past 15 years, a class-action lawsuit has been winding its way through the courts on behalf of the more than 125,000 people who drink, bathe, fish, and wash their clothes in tainted headwaters of the Amazon River.

Now a single judge is expected to rule in the case in 2009 from a ramshackle courtroom in this northern frontier town.

Statements from a court-appointed scientist suggest that Chevron Corp. - which bought Texaco in 2001 - will be held responsible for the many oil spills and dumping of toxic wastewater.

If Chevron loses, it could be ordered to pay up to $27.3 billion in damages, though an appeal would be likely.

The scientist, geological engineer Richard Cabrera, largely accepts plaintiffs' claims that Texaco left a mess when it left in the early 1990s. He is recommending damages based partly on his calculation of 1,401 pollution-caused cancer deaths.

Chevron does not deny "the presence of pollution and we don't deny that there were impacts," says spokesman Kent Robertson. But Chevron contends a 1998 agreement that Texaco signed with Ecuador, after spending $40 million on remediation, absolves it of any legal responsibility. It says, and few dispute, that its former partner, state oil company Petroecuador, kept polluting after Texaco departed.

But two wrongs don't make a right, argues law professor Judith Kimerling, a former New York state prosecutor whose 1991 book "Amazon Crude" first publicized what some environmentalists have called a rainforest Chernobyl.

"I really think the remediation they did was a sham," she says.

When Donald Moncayo was a boy, he remembers, Texaco soaked the dirt thoroughfares it cut through the jungle with crude to keep dust down.

"We would run on roads they coated with oil," he says. "We went to sleep with our feet black. You could only remove it with gasoline."

Pipelines across the area connected the wells to the 313-mile Trans-Ecuadorean Pipeline built by Texaco to carry crude to the Pacific. Moncayo, 35, can't remember when the pipelines weren't springing leaks.

His mother died in 1987 from an internal infection he blames on oil contamination. Now he works for the plaintiffs, taking visitors on "toxic tours."

One of the first stops is a fresh spill. It's little more than 50 gallons, dark and gooey. Bigger spills have smothered crops, choked birds, killed cattle.