St. Landry Parish and the village of Crankton have filed suit against Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron U.S.A. and other energy companies, alleging that they’re responsible for groundwater contamination from a former oilfield tank farm.
Environmental attorney William Goodell filed a supplemental petition earlier this month in the 27th Judicial District Court in St. Landry in the case involving the former 80-acre Cankton Tank Farm. The complaint alleges the tank farm is the source of waste materials that contaminated groundwater, drinking water wells and the Chicot Aquifer.
“Despite prior lawsuits, piecemeal testing and decades of environmental regulatory agency ‘oversight,’ no meaningful action has been ordered, much less taken, to require a comprehensive assessment of the groundwater contamination in violation of numerous state environmental protection laws,” a press release from the Goodell Law Firm in Acadia states.
The amended complaint asks the court for an injunction to stop alleged ongoing contamination of local groundwater, funding of a comprehensive environmental assessment of the site, compensatory damages that include land restoration costs, punitive damages, legal costs and attorney fees.
An Exxon Mobil spokesman, however, said a mitigation process for the site has already been put in place.
“Union Oil Company of California joined with Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc. (MOEPSI) and the state of Louisiana more than 15 years ago to ensure that the site is properly managed and does not present any environmental or health concerns,” Todd Spitler told the Louisiana Record in an email. “After years of testing and analysis of the soil and groundwater, appropriate state agencies approved a MAR Services site remediation plan in 2001 that was implemented by a third party with state oversight.”
Exxon Mobil is seeking to resolve the dispute without the need for lengthy legal proceedings.
“MOEPSI hopes that when stakeholders are provided complete information about this site, it will show that litigation is neither necessary nor productive,” Spitler said.
The plaintiffs’ complaint is based on an analysis of the groundwater issues by a former Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality secretary, Paul Templet, and contends the materials that reached the groundwater include metals, chlorides, radium and hydrocarbons such as benzene.
“Certain defendants brazenly concocted and put into play a covert enterprise conspiracy scheme to manipulate, coerce and mislead local governments, citizens, politicians and understaffed, overworked, underfunded and overwhelmed state environmental regulatory agencies into allowing defendants to do nothing affirmative to fix and protect the public from the Cankton Tank Farm Facility groundwater contaminant discharge and migration problem each defendant had to a lesser or greater extent contributed to,” the complaint states.
Louisiana parishes have also filed other civil lawsuits in recent years against energy companies, contending that they are responsible for billions of dollars in damages for coastal erosion problems. Typically, attorneys have advanced these cases based on contingency fee agreements.