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Pollution Case Seeping To End

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The Associated Press

Published: February 9, 2009

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 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, Juan Evangelista Nunez, is expected to rule in the case this year. Statements from a court-appointed expert suggest Chevron - which bought Texaco in 2001 - will be held responsible for the many oil spills and dumping of wastewater. If Chevron loses, it could be ordered to pay up to $27.3 billion in damages, though an appeal would be likely.

The expert, geological engineer Richard Cabrera, largely accepts plaintiffs' claims that Texaco left a mess when it left in the early 1990s.

Chevron does not deny "the presence of pollution and we don't deny that there were impacts," spokesman Kent Robertson says. 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 left.

When Donald Moncayo was a child, 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."

Ecuadorean governments reaped the wealth of Texaco's jungle project, with gross domestic product more than tripling from 1972 to 1977.

The plaintiffs say Texaco saved $8 to $10 a barrel by dumping some 18 billion gallons of the wastewater from drilling and extraction into waste pits instead of re-injecting it back deep into the ground. The more than 1,000 waste pits were not lined, so the toxins seeped into the groundwater, they say.

The plaintiffs also allege the company poisoned the air by burning off natural gas and set fire to solid waste during the 1990s remediation. They say they found a July 1972 Texaco memo that orders the company's acting manager in Ecuador to report only major spills and destroy "all previous reports" on spills.

If the plaintiffs win, according to their lead attorney, Pablo Fajardo, residents will finally get a potable water distribution system and basic health care. But should Chevron have to underwrite the creation of services that no government bothered to offer?

"It's a bit of opportunism and a bit of populism rolled into one," Robertson says.

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