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Exxon Charged With Illegally Dumping Waste In Pennsylvania
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.”'
A corporation's board of directors are legally responsible for the company's actions.
Failure to appear when subpoenas are issued will have serious consequences for the billionaires.
You can't just send a lawyer to represent you in a criminal court.
Forcing the people that run the company to show up in court will send a message.
It's according to how much actual toxic waste was in the water.
While the article (and the excerpt above) mention a list of scary chemicals that "can" be found in wastewater from natural gas drilling, it's also quite possible that the major component was... mud. And a small percentage of oil (usually three percent or less, and even lower for a natural gas well, all the way down to "practically zero") - and other not-very-toxic stuff. Or "toxic chemicals" found in parts per million or lower. If they were using fracking chemicals, the mud might have had some bleach and surfactants in it.
Now, if the rock they were drilling through had a high metal content, the water may have picked up some of that - but probably not too much, overall. Enough to break water standards, but not enough to be actually dangerous.
Since there's no charges, it was probably low-concentration stuff - a technical violation, but not serious.
Of course not. Back then kids learned about guns and respected them... or rather acted like stupid juveniles with access to firearms