An amended lawsuit has been filed against Union Pacific involving contamination of the Chicot Aquifer, where Lafayette area business owners and their attorney allege their properties are at risk.
Attorney William Goodell said the initial lawsuit was filed because there had been several regulatory compliance orders from about 20 years ago that were determined to need no further action, but after viewing the site and taking soil tests it was clear there was contamination.
“Given the information that we had on the environmental conditions at the site, when I found out about it I was just amazed that an agency could make that kind of a determination when you had basically oil saturated soil down to the top of your drinking water aquifer," he said. "That was a big red flag to me.”
Goodell explained that oil saturation is at a point where it can not only be detected in soil samples in a lab, but it can also be seen with the naked eye. He said there was crude oil floating in the ground water. He said studies were done two decades ago and while some minimal spot cleaning was done at the site, it was not sufficient. He explained that pollutants and contaminants were dumped from the early 1800s to the 1960s.
Last year, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development took samples because they wanted to build an interstate over the area, Goodell said, which involves digging deep into the ground. The department, along with Union Pacific and attorneys for the plaintiffs, took samples and had a lab run tests.
“Simply put, it is highly contaminated with free oil,” Goodell said. “Oil is floating around out there. That is not a safe condition and is not allowed under any environmental regulation or statute. It is a source of continued harm to Lafayette’s drinking water supply.”
Goodell said the case is not a class action for the purpose of making money, but rather a public law environmental enforcement suit that allows any citizen who may be harmed to enforce the state’s public law statutes and regulations. He said the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality determined no further action was necessary 20 years ago, but given the current site conditions, the lawsuit was filed because no action was taken to alleviate the concern.