Southern California Gas to pay $8.5 million to settle lawsuit over Aliso Canyon leak

From:  LA Times 

by Tony Barboza
February 8, 2017

A tarp covers the well where the 2015 gas leak occurred at the Aliso Canyon storage facility near L.A.'s Porter Ranch neighborhood. (Jae C. Hong / Associated Press)

Southern California Gas Co. will pay $8.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by air quality regulators over the Aliso Canyon gas leak and will fund a study of community health effects. 

The settlement with the South Coast Air Quality Management District, announced Wednesday, resolves a dispute over the months-long leak of methane from the gas company’s Aliso Canyon storage facility above the Porter Ranch neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The facility has been shut down since a well blowout in late October 2015 resulted in the worst methane leak in U.S. history. The invisible gas spewed for nearly four months, causing 8,000 residents to flee their homes, many complaining of headaches, nosebleeds and nausea. MORE

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Chevron Continues in Canada

From:  Truth Out 

Sunday, February 12, 2017By Joe Emersberger, teleSUR | Interview

In 1993, US lawyer Steven Donziger and others filed a lawsuit in New York against Texaco on behalf of Indigenous nationalities and campesino communities in Ecuador's Amazon whose land and water had been thoroughly contaminated over a 26-year period.

From 1964-1990, Texaco ran all drilling, waste disposal, and pipeline operations in the region and admitted it had dumped 16 billion gallons of oil waste into rivers and streams relied on by local inhabitants for their drinking water, bathing, and fishing. The damage has been called the "Amazon Chernobyl" by locals and is considered by some experts to be the worst oil-related environmental disaster on the planet and credibly linked to unusually high cancer rates in the area.

Texaco spent almost 10 years fighting to get the lawsuit moved to Ecuador's courts, which it praised in numerous sworn affidavits. In 2001, Chevron (which had just merged with Texaco) won that battle and agreed to abide by any judgment issued in Ecuador, subject only to narrow enforcement defenses.  MORE