This summer a decision was reached by the United States Supreme Court. This involves the recovery of the costs on the government, in regards to the environmental efforts to cleanup toxic spills when the various companies are found to have little or no responsibility, when they are found to be not at fault.
This stemmed from a case in Kern County, California, in the city of Arvin. Any Los Angeles County or Orange County lawyer knows that this can have serious circumstances, especially for those counties that sit along the coastlines of the Pacific Ocean. This decision has served to expand the breadth of what was formally known to be the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act, and is now referred to simply as the Superfund Law.
This law limits which kind of company would be able to be held liable for any toxic contamination or chemical spills, and it governs which situations are those that a company would be held liable to carry the entire cost of any cleanup necessary following such a spill. This has all stemmed from a chemical contamination that happened in Arvin, California. The company is in the distribution industry. The company had experienced ongoing leaks on their plant, and the company that sold them those chemicals was the Shell Oil Company.
The distribution company has since claimed bankruptcy and gone out of business. In this case it was not the Shell company that was directly responsible for the contamination, however under the Superfund Law, due to the fact that Shell knew that this was an ongoing problem and did nothing about it, that were to be held responsible. One of the Supreme Court Justices claimed that since Shell was not directly responsible, the grounds for liability were insufficient.
While another of the Justices dissented, stating that when a company is aware of what is going on and does nothing about it for twenty years, that the cost of cleanup should be the responsibility of the Shell Oil Company and not the responsibility of the taxpayers. For now, they are to be held partially financially responsible, unless the decision gets over turned once again.