Exxon Charged With Illegally Dumping Waste In Pennsylvania 246
Exxon has been charged with illegally dumping over 50,000 gallons of wastewater at a shale-gas drilling site in Pennsylvania. From the article: 'Exxon unit XTO Energy Inc. discharged the water from waste tanks at the Marquandt well site in Lycoming County in 2010, according to a statement on the website of Pennsylvania’s attorney general. The pollution was found during an unannounced visit by the state’s Department of Environmental Protection.
The inspectors discovered a plug removed from a tank, allowing the wastewater to run onto the ground, polluting a nearby stream. XTO was ordered to remove 3,000 tons of soil to clean up the area. Wastewater discharged from natural-gas wells can contain chlorides, barium, strontium and aluminum, the attorney general’s statement showed.
“Criminal charges are unwarranted and legally baseless,” the XTO unit said yesterday in a statement posted on its website. “There was no intentional, reckless or negligent misconduct by XTO.”'
Yes, it happens (Score:4, Interesting)
Nuke, frak, solar panel production, high capacity battery production....some idiot middle manager will try to reduce costs at his level, and this is what we get.
Re:Can we have someone go to jail now, please? (Score:1, Interesting)
I want companies to be executed for crimes that would warrant it for us. That would require shareholders to have broad powers to correct misconduct since they will lose everything if they're not fixing them.
You convict them, lock up all management and take everything needed to clean up their mess and then revoke their right to run as a business. If the shareholders are culpable you keep 80% of the sale. They can spin and get papercuts on their share paperwork.
Those chemicals are an assault with a deadly weapon of mass destruction. They should be put up against the wall and shot.
Re:They dumped the waste water yet no misconduct (Score:5, Interesting)
Because shit happens. I've worked at several big chemical plants and all of them have had spills. (To me, this sounds like a "spill" and not "dumping waste.") It's just the nature of the beast, nothing works perfectly all the time. At one plant in particular, vandals/kids/idiots with too much time on their hands got onto the property (not hard to do when the facility covers thousands of acres) and removed a cover off a pipe, causing thousands of gallons of water with a ph of about 1 to flow into a nearby stream, which eventually made its way into the bay and caused a large fish kill. Yes, the company was fined. Yes, corrective action was taken to avoid it from happening again.
From what I read, Exxon cleaned up the contaminated area as best they could. I seriously doubt the spill was done on purpose. I live in the middle of frack-land and these oil companies are spending millions buying/leasing mineral rights, hauling equipment in and out, drilling, fracking, trucking out wastewater and hauling equipment away. Millions of dollars are spent at each drill site. They're not going to risk "dumping" wastewater to save a few bucks on having it hauled away.
Re:No (Score:3, Interesting)
Course, back then, they actually funded things like mental hospitals to treat mental patients, not elect them to Congress...