Duo tracks double-dipping in U.S. oil firms' toxic tank cleanup
Source: Reuters
A pioneer in cleaning up toxic messes, Thomas Schruben long suspected major oil companies of being paid twice for dealing with leaks from underground fuel storage tanks - once from government funds and again, secretly, from insurance companies.
Schruben, a detail-oriented Maryland environmental engineer who helped draft government pollution rules going back 30 years, looked for a lawyer to help ferret out what he believed could in some cases be fraud. He found a partner in Dennis Pantazis, a buoyant, mustachioed son of Greek immigrants in Alabama known for bringing environmental and civil rights cases.
"Together we started unraveling the mystery," Schruben said.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Schruben's former employer, has called the rusted, leaky steel tanks the single largest threat to groundwater in the United States. Often built for gas stations during the 1950s and '60s highway construction boom, the tanks corroded over time, spilling gas and diesel with potentially cancer-causing chemicals under properties and into aquifers.
The two men assembled a team of lawyers...
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/10/us-usa-environment-tanks-idUSBREA1905G20140210
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It appears that 40 states have set up funds to pay the cost of clean-up that should rightfully be paid by the corporate polluter.
If, in fact, the corporate polluter went bankrupt before being able to pay for the entire cost of its pollution, then it would make sense for the taxpayers to do the clean up.
But why should the taxpayers foot the bill just because the corporate polluter did not purchase insurance from an underwriter, and is, in effect, self insured (and making billions in profits while its executives take home multimillion dollar annual salaries)?
Certainly the fact that these CEO criminals compounded their crimes by turning their pollution into a profit center by simultaneously being paid by insurers for the clean-up which the taxpayers had already paid for, adds criminal insult to injury.
But what does it say about our political system when 40 states set up funds specifically to insulate solvent corporate criminals from the costs of paying for their willful environmental negligence?
Would it not make more sense to spend a fraction of the money to hold the solvent corporate polluters responsible for the ENTIRE cost of cleanup in civil court, and to provide lodging for the CEO's responsible for negligently damaging our aquifers, and then fraudulently turning their pollution into a profit-generating scam, in the state pen?
