ChevronTexaco could be fined hundreds of millions of dollars and be forced to spend more than $1-billion cleaning up pollution from 28 years of oil extraction in Ecuador, if a court case that has opened in a small frontier town on the edge of the Amazon forest finds against it.
The class-action case against the world’s second-largest oil company is being brought by 30 000 people, who say their lives and livelihoods were damaged by the company’s operations between 1964 and 1992.
According to the original lawsuit in 1993, Texaco extracted 1,5-billion barrels of oil during the years it spent in Ecuador and systematically disposed of its waste in up to 600 open, unlined pits, many of which have leaked and affected water supplies.
Lawyers working for the indigenous peoples will argue that Texaco saved $4-billion by not reinjecting the toxic waste back into the earth, which is standard practice.
They also allege that the company discharged up to 15-million litres a day of highly toxic waste water straight into the Amazon wetlands, rivers and estuaries. It is claimed that up to one million hectares of rainforest along the route of Texaco’s pipelines and wells were polluted or destroyed.
Much of the waste oil has leached into the groundwater and rivers. Samples taken from the waste pits show that many contain cancer-causing chemicals.
But ChevronTexaco will argue that the use of waste pits was legal and common at the time. ChevronTexaco spokesperson Maritpat Sexton said that the government of Ecuador, four of its local administrations and the country’s national oil company had absolved Texaco of any legal claims after it spent $40-million capping 250 of the pits and building schools and medical centres in the mid-1990s.
Steven Donziger, a New York-based lawyer for communities, said the case could set an international precedent for millions of people affected by oil-drilling to use their own legal systems to sue corporations. ”This has enormous significance for the oil industry.” — Â