Oil Companies Dumped Contaminated Waste, Feds Say

BP North America and 10 other companies illegally dumped contaminated material at an oilfield waste disposal facility in Jefferson Parish, La., according to a recent lawsuit filed by the federal government.

The lawsuit seeks to hold the companies jointly and severally liable under the federal Superfund law for the $2.8 million in costs the government spent to clean up the site.

Joint and several liability means that the federal government can recover the total amount of the cleanup costs from any one of the defendants regardless of its individual share of the liability.

The defendants named in the complaint include BP, Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Onshore, Davis Oil Co. and Franks Petroleum Corp.. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The complaint says Castex Systems Inc., which is not a defendant in the case, operated the Jefferson Parish site as an oilfield waste disposal facility between 1982 and 1989. Castex accepted deliveries of saltwater, drilling mud and other wastes produced by the defendants' operations.

These wastes were put either in an on-site pond or in tanks.

According to the federal government, the saltwater contained naturally occurring radioactive material, and the drilling mud contained various heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium, chromium, mercury and lead.

At the request of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources in 1996, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conducted a cleanup action at the site in four phases.

The EPA finished the cleanup in October 2001.