Volunteers aid an oil-slicked seabird. Photo Courtesy of Papa Bois Conservation

By Peter Richards
PORT OF SPAIN, Dec 23 2013 (IPS)

Whether it is a case of sabotage or simply poor management practices by the state-owned PETROTRIN, as the union claims, a mysterious oil spill in south Trinidad is wreaking havoc on homes and wildlife in the area.

PETROTRIN claims it has no idea as to the source of the spills, and Energy Minister Kevin Ramnarine, who toured La Brea and other affected areas on Sunday, said “the mystery remains where this oil is coming from.”"Shut it down, if you don’t know where it is coming from." -- Gary Aboud

The Environmental Management Authority also said it had been unable to ascertain the source and that its immediate concern was the protection of life and the environment.

Gary Aboud, president of Fishermen and Friends of the Sea, told IPS that the only solution was to shut down all oil production in the area.

“As we speak, more and more oil is being pumped into the sea. Why doesn’t the minister order the shutdown of all oil being transported in the Gulf of Paria? Shut it down, if you don’t know where it is coming from,” he said. “We find it totally unbelievable.”

According to the head of the La Brea Fisherfolk Association, Alvin La Borde, “[Local] fishermen cannot go out to work. They need to buy things for their families for Christmas. They would not be able to leave until this oil is cleared.

“The fishermen have also lost nets and ropes used to secure their boats,” he told IPS.

In a statement, the EMA said it “will continue to closely monitor clean-up efforts and ensure that environmental best practices are carried out.

“Once the source of the spillage is determined, the EMA will be assessing the situation from a legal and compliance perspective to ascertain whether there is any breach in environmental legislation.”

Fitzgerald Jeffrey, the member of Parliament for the La Brea region, which is known for having the largest natural deposit of asphalt in the world, told IPS that he is hoping the evacuation is carried out “as quickly as possible”.

“There are young people and it is difficult for them to breathe…and as much as 24 families are directly affected. In addition, there are fishing vessels contaminated with oil. We are seeing crabs and dead fish along the beach.

“Yesterday I was down there and there is a very strong gas scent and people have been advised not to do any cooking in the area,” he added.

On Monday, the environmental group Papa Bois Conservation issued an urgent appeal for paper towels, dishwashing liquid and other supplies to aid birds that are covered in oil.

The Wildlife Orphanage and Rehabilitation Centre (WORC), which is also trying to rescue animals affected by the oil spill, reports “oil in the mangrove as well as a strong hydrocarbon smell”. The WORC also posted on its website a picture of an oil-slicked dead pelican at La Brea.

PETROTRIN, which has been in operation for 100 years, has acknowledged that there are installations across the country engaged in refinery activities and that some of its pipelines may still contain hydrocarbons that can be hazardous to health.

Ramnarine said the authorities were now seeking international assistance in dealing with the oil spill, even as the Oilfield Workers Trade Union (OWTU) maintained that PETROTRIN should shoulder the blame for the environmental disaster.

“We do not concur with the company’s offering of the excuse that it is some kind of sabotage or otherwise,” OWTU president general Ancel Roget told a news conference on Sunday.

“We want to say there is a massive cover-up of the PETROTRIN management to shield their friends, the lease operators, who they invited to and in fact gave away some of the lucrative acreage of PETROTRIN assets, and therefore a cloud of silence and secrecy has shrouded the lease operators in the La Brea situation,” he said.

Roget has accused the company of knowingly reducing the level of security in the fields, allowing thieves to roam freely.

“The reduction and removal of morning tower shifts…these shifts provided as a monitoring effort and additional security effort so that if there are any oil spills throughout fields they were reported in real time.”

Roget said PETROTRIN had no emergency response contract to deal with the latest series of oil spills, saying “they violate their own investigation policy which states that investigations of that nature ought to take place within the first 24 hours.”

But Ramnarine said that unmanned platforms were part of the industry globally.

“We can’t put people on every single platform,” he said, adding “in the Gulf of Mexico, there are unmanned platforms.”

Over the weekend, PETROTRIN’s president Khalid Hassanali said one of the company’s lease operators, Trinity Oil and Gas, had discovered several valves open at its operations in Rancho Quemado, allowing oil to flow out of the tanks onto the lands.

“This is of concern because the other spills have been marine. It is extremely disturbing because…the valves were found opened which doesn’t normally happen. All these things happened together,” he said, saying that the company was now investigating whether the oil spills were acts of sabotage.

“To reach that conclusion one needs to go through a process of investigation. It’s early, we can’t reach that conclusion without being fair and without investigating fully,” he told a news conference.

The company issued a statement informing residents in nearby villages that oil had been sighted along the coastline near shore and on land and that they should avoid venturing in or near the sea.

Outside the New York federal courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gather to protest the Chevron lawsuit. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
NEW YORK, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two years after they were awarded 18 billion dollars by an Ecuadorian court for environmental damage caused by Chevron in the Amazonian rainforest, a group of indigenous villagers and their U.S. lawyer went on trial Tuesday in New York, accused by the oil company of bribery and racketeering.

Chevron was found liable in 2011 for an ecological catastrophe caused by pollution released in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001 and for which they agreed to assume legal obligations.“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination." -- Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian from Ecuador

Chevron has refused to pay the penalty.

Because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador, the plaintiffs have attempted to collect the fine abroad.

The New York suit, filed under the RICO statute, a strategy made famous during Mafia prosecutions in the 1970s, seeks to block enforcement of the 2011 decision in U.S. courts, where Chevron maintains ample reserves to foot the bill.

The complaint claims the lawyer, Steven Donziger, and a group of Ecuadorians representing the 30,000 original Amazonian plaintiffs attempted to persuade and corrupt a series of Ecuadorian judges who heard the case in an attempt to extort Chevron.

Donziger and the Ecuadorian defendants deny any wrongdoing and assert the lawsuit is another expensive legal distraction that the 230-billion-dollar corporation can afford to tack onto what has become a 20-year saga of litigation.

Outside the courthouse, Ecuadorians and their supporters gathered to protest the case.

Demonstrators chanted and held photographs depicting shiny, blackened earth, open runoff pits and frail jungle residents who they said were dying from cancers that resulted from the estimated 18 million gallons of crude oil and 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater that was leaked or illegally pumped into pristine jungle ecosystems around the Lago Agrio field the northwest of the country.

“We’re here in front of the courts against this large corporation,” said one of the defendants, Javier Piaguaje, a Secoya Indian who lives along the heavily polluted and now-ironically named “Aguarico” River.

Dressed in traditional Secoya garb, Piaguaje told the crowd the lasting effects of the spill were ravaging his community.

“Every day, family members and loved ones are sickened because of the contamination,” said Piaguaje.

“We’re here to show what’s really going on in the Amazon,” he added, before turning to enter the courthouse and mount his defence.

The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, has long been a thorn in the side of indigenous plaintiffs.

Earlier this month, Kaplan decided Donziger and his co-defendents were not entitled to a trial by jury.

“This trial is a travesty of justice,” said Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch, an environmental justice group that assists the Ecuadorian claim.

“Chevron has spent years to have a trial where the original plaintiffs are not allowed to discuss the evidence,” Paz y Miño told IPS.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud on behalf of the plaintiff,” he added.

A spokesperson for the defendants in the New York case, Han Shan, told IPS the lawsuit took a lot of chutzpah on the part of Chevron.

“They’ve done a great job of media and political jujitsu in taking things that we were alleging, Chevron being totally corrupt, putting pressure on judges, bribery, trying to entrap people, using dirty contracters and said that we did it,” said Shan.

In 2009, Diego Borja, a Chevron contractor in Ecuador, was caught trying to entrap the presiding judge, Juan Nunez, by videotaping himself offering Nunez a bribe. Chevron has since paid for Borja to move to the United States and supplies him with a monthly stipend.

The Chevron media relations website was down for maintenance at the time of this article and IPS was unable to reach the company for comment.

However, on the company’s website devoted to the lawsuit, Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, says, “We believe that any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law will find that the judgment is illegal and unenforceable because it’s a product of fraud.”

The trial taking place in Manhattan hinges in large part on Donziger’s personal diary and hours of outtakes from Joe Berlinger’s 2009 film, “Crude,” which Chevron claims show Donziger considered some of the environment evidence in the lawsuit to be “all smoke and mirrors.”

Donziger has said his quotes were taken out of context.

Judge Kaplan has already decided in favour of Chevron once.

In March 2011, Kaplan issued a global injunction that blocked enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment, effectively kneecapping indigenous claims.

In January 2012, however, the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York overturned the injunction, which opened the door once more for the original plaintiffs to enforce the 18-billion-dollar decision in U.S. courts.

That decision led Chevron team of over 100 lawyers to cobble together a last ditch defence strategy in form of the RICO suit, which they worked hard to have heard in Kaplan’s courtroom.

Shan isn’t optimistic about Kaplan presiding over the case.

“I don’t feel Kaplan will give us a fair hearing,” said Shan. “I think he’s already made up his mind.”

But should Kaplan rule against the indigenous community and issue a global injunction once more, Shan is confident the 2^nd Circuit will strike it down.

“The 2nd Circuit has been clear that the U.S. District Court is not an appellate court for the Ecuadorian judiciary and there’s absolutely no jurisdiction for that kind of injunction,” said Shan.

Workers mop up tar sands oil from Exxon Mobil Pegasus pipeline spill from creek in Mayflower, Arkansas. Credit: NWFblogs/cc by 2.0

By Katelyn Fossett
Apr 3 2013 (IPS)

Environmental groups are sounding alarms about conflicting reports on the size and seriousness of an oil spill that took place late last week in the southern U.S. state of Arkansas.

The spill has generated particular interest because it emanates from a pipeline carrying “tar sands” oil, a particularly heavy and environmentally destructive oil composed of bitumen and diluted with lighter elements.A lot of the people we talked to said, ‘We didn’t even know there was a pipeline under our homes.'

It also comes just as politicians and environmentalists here are engaged in a debate over whether to approve the construction of a major pipeline – known as Keystone XL – that would carry the same tar sands oil from Canada to the southern U.S.

“[Pipeline owner] ExxonMobil is sort of dancing around how they’re describing it,” Jane Kleeb, executive director of BOLD Nebraska, an advocacy group fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, told IPS.

“Every time they talk about the oil spill, they describe it in different terms – sometimes as crude oil, sometimes Canadian oil – but we’re fairly certain it is tar sands oil.”

On Tuesday, 22 homes in the town of Mayflower were evacuated and at least 12,000 barrels of what the Sierra Club, an environment group, calls the “dirtiest oil on Earth” had been released, reportedly darkening yards and driveways across the suburban town.
Critics of the Keystone project, including BOLD Nebraska, are particularly concerned about the spill’s release of benzene, a carcinogenic chemical found in tar sands oil, and bitumen, which climate scientists say releases 17 percent more greenhouse gases than standard oil.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is surveying the environmental and health evidence in order to determine whether the construction of Keystone XL would serve the “nation’s interest”. He is expected to give a final ruling on Canadian company Transcanada’s application to build the pipeline by late summer.

Despite environmental concerns, recently released polls from the Pew Research Center suggest broad support has been gathering for the project’s approval, likely bolstered by Congressional Republicans’ trumpeting the project’s potential for job creation.

The spill also comes a month after a draft environmental impact assessment from the U.S. State Department concluded that the Keystone XL project would “not likely result in significant adverse environmental effects”. That conclusion is likely to be subject to greater scrutiny as Mayflower residents continue to reel from the spill’s damage.

“To see the devastation in that town is pretty sobering,” Glenn Hooks, a spokesman for the Arkansas chapter of the Sierra Club, told reporters Tuesday. “I spoke with people whose lives have been upended – they want to know when they can go home, and they want to know if there will be a home to come back to.”

Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a watchdog group, said the spill brings the risks of the Keystone XL pipeline into “sharp relief for the American people”.

Swift noted that bitumen oil pipelines require higher operating temperatures that make ruptures more likely, citing a study that found that states that carried bitumen oil for the longest periods had experienced 3.6 times as many spills as the national average.

He called the Mayflower oil spill “a tragic warning”, but alluded to previous warnings that had gone unheeded.

“TransCanada’s Bison and Keystone I pipelines had special conditions that were supposed to make them safer. The Keystone I pipeline had to be shut down in its first year after having 14 spills,” he said.

Little clarity

In the days following the Mayflower spill, the opaqueness surrounding the leak and the pipeline in general has been of particular concern for environmental groups.

“A lot of the people we talked to said, ‘We didn’t even know there was a pipeline under our homes,’” said Hooks of the Arkansas Sierra Club. “And I’m sure the ones who did know were surprised to learn it was a tar sands oil pipeline.”

Kleeb, of BOLD Nebraska, pointed to ExxonMobil’s failure to disclose potential health hazards by specifying sooner exactly what kind of oil had been spilled.

“ExxonMobil is not giving folks a clear sense of what was spilled … It’s obvious why they’re not saying it’s tar sands,” she said, referring to the growing concerns over tar sands oil pipelines in the midst of the Keystone debate.

Exxon spokesperson Charles Engelmann said the leaking pipeline was built in the 1940s, but did not have any information on when it last underwent maintenance. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Transportation fined the company for going more than five years without maintenance on a section of the same pipeline beneath the Mississippi River.

With environmental groups already sceptical of an incomplete picture of the environmental and public health impact of Keystone XL, many are now suggesting that these growing signals of oil companies’ poor commitment to maintenance and regulation standards should carry serious implications for the president’s ultimate decision to approve the project.

“Looking at the differences between the reality and rhetoric, TransCanada’s claims that this pipeline will be different don’t add up,” warned Swift of the National Resources Defense Council.

The U.S. justice department is blaming BP PLC for the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, describing in new court papers examples of what it calls “gross negligence and willful misconduct”.

The court filing is the sharpest position yet taken by the U.S. government as it seeks to hold the British oil giant largely responsible for the largest oil spill, as well as the largest environmental disaster, in U.S. history.

Gross negligence

Gross negligence is a central issue to the case, scheduled to go to trial in New Orleans in January 2013. A gross negligence finding could nearly quadruple the civil damages owed by BP under the Clean Water Act to 21 billion dollars.

The U.S. government and BP are engaged in talks to settle civil and potential criminal liability, though neither side will comment on the status of negotiations.

“The behaviour, words and actions of these BP executives would not be tolerated in a middling size company manufacturing dry goods for sale in a suburban mall,” government lawyers wrote in the filing on Aug. 31 in federal court in New Orleans.

The filing comes more than two years after the disaster that struck on Apr. 20, 2010 when a surge of methane gas known to rig hands as a “kick” sparked an explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig as it was drilling the mile-deep Macondo 252 well off Louisiana’s coast. The rig sank two days later.

The well gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 straight days, unleashing a torrent of oil that fouled the shorelines of four Gulf Coast states and eclipsed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in severity.

Al Jazeera’s Dahr Jamail, who has covered the disaster from the beginning, believes the government’s statement is an accurate portrayal of BP’s actions that led to the disaster, and that it underscores the fact that the impacted areas of the Gulf continue to suffer environmental impacts.

“This filing means that government agencies now stand behind some key allegations made by regional scientists and fishermen,” Jamail said, “And that is that BP isn’t telling the truth when it tries to convince the American people, via an ongoing nationwide PR campaign, that everything is back to normal in the Gulf and that BP is a responsible company. The reality is that the fishing industry continues to suffer, there are ongoing seafood malformations and deformities, and large areas where there is still oil.”

Specifically, errors made by BP and Swiss-based Transocean Ltd, owner of the Deepwater Horizon platform, in deciphering a key pressure test of the Macondo well are a clear indication of gross negligence, the Justice Department said.

“That such a simple, yet fundamental and safety-critical test could have been so stunningly, blindingly botched in so many ways, by so many people, demonstrates gross negligence,” the government said in its 39-page filing.

BP rejection

BP rejects the charge. “BP believes it was not grossly negligent and looks forward to presenting evidence on this issue at trial in January,” the company said in a statement. A Transocean spokesman had no immediate comment.

On Aug. 13, BP urged U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier to approve an estimated 7.8-billion-dollar settlement reached with 125,000 individuals and businesses, asserting its actions “did not constitute gross negligence or willful misconduct”.

The government said Barbier should avoid making any finding about BP’s potential gross negligence when he rules on the settlement. Barbier will hold a fairness hearing on that settlement on Nov. 8.

Barbier should also disregard claims made by BP that minimise the environmental and economic impacts of the spill, the government said, citing environmental harms like severe ill health of dolphins in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay, which saw some of the heaviest oiling from the spill.

Exasperation

The filing does exhibit exasperation on the part of government lawyers. They wrote that they decided to elaborate on BP’s alleged gross negligence because they believed BP was trying to escape full responsibility.

The justice department said they feared that “if the United States were to remain silent, BP later may urge that its arguments had assumed the status of agreed facts”.

*Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.