The tumultuous fight between Louisiana landowners and the oil and gas industry over environmental damages and legacy lawsuits is an overly politicized process, which typically results in tainted lands being left as is.
The tumultuous fight between Louisiana landowners and the oil and gas industry over environmental damages and legacy lawsuits is an overly politicized process, which typically results in tainted lands being left as is.
A recent in-depth report by WWL TV News out of New Orleans shows that over the last two decades, more than 360 legacy lawsuits have been filed by landowners against Big Oil, resulting in multi-million dollar settlements. The problem, according to the report, is that the damaged lands are rarely cleaned.
While Louisiana Oil and Gas Association President Don Briggs argues that the lack of cleanup is because of "greedy trial lawyers" who just want a paycheck, that's not the case.
Briggs and his ilk base their argument on a 2003 case known as the mother of all Louisiana's legacy lawsuits. It's called the Corbello case, and resulted in Shell Oil being forced to pay a $73 million judgment - including a remediation award of $33 million. The ruling stated that the family, however, was not required to clean up the land, and it never was. But there's a reason for that. According to Corbello's lead attorney, Mike Veron, the oil companies made it impossible for the family to obtain a Corps of Engineers permit to clean the land.
According to Tulane law professor Oliver Houck, one of the main problems with the lack of cleanup centers on the state's arm of enforcement, the Office of Conservation, which is housed in the Department of Natural Resources.
"They're not interested in cleanup," Houck tells WWL. "They're interested in getting out of the way of the oil and gas industry. That's the Huey Long bargain and it's been the bargain in Louisiana since the 1920s."
A solution, says Houck, would be to transfer the regulation of oil and gas activities from DNR to the Department of Environmental Quality, which already oversees this type of regulation over every industry in the state except oil and gas.
In the meantime, it's trial attorneys like John Carmouche - one of the leading legacy lawsuit attorneys in the state - who are vilified by the industry.
"The sad part is, who becomes the bad guy?" Carmouche tells WWL. "I go down to the Legislature and landowners, for suing oil companies, [and I'm] called [for] filing frivolous lawsuits, committing fraud, holding oil companies hostage."
Aside from the numerous lawsuits he's filed against the industry, there may, however, be another reason for the attack on Carmouche, notably the 50 years worth of internal company documents and memos he's recovered from oil and gas companies showing their knowledge of the toxic nature of their operations and the damage being caused to the environment, as well as admissions of their knowledge of the government's lax regulation and their potential for major lawsuits.
Click here to read WWL's full story.