Chevron has been accused of manipulating laboratory results to "evade judgment" at a $27 billion class action trial.
Lawyers for indigenous Amazon tribes allege that Chevron's "misleading" lab results have been presented by the company as a defence to the environmental lawsuit, brought by 30,000 rainforest residents over the dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic waste in Ecuador.
Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, reportedly used the test results to obtain a legal release from Ecuador's government to absolve it of liability. Texaco was the sole operator of a large concession in Ecuador's rainforest from 1964 to 1990.
"The new evidence definitively proves that Chevron has lied to the courts and the Ecuadorian people about an environmental remediation that failed miserably to deliver the results promised," claimed lead lawyer Pablo Fajardo.
Douglas Beltman, an executive vice-president at Stratus Consulting in Boulder, explained that Texaco utilised a laboratory test known as the Toxicity Characteristic Leaching Procedure (TCLP) to measure soil contamination following clean-up efforts in the area. According to Beltman, the test is designed to evaluate the amount of soil contamination that leaches into surrounding water, rather than the amount of contamination in the soil itself.
"If nothing were done at a site contaminated with pure crude oil, a sample measured using the TCLP test would still easily pass Texaco's clean-up standard," said Beltman. "The entire Texaco clean-up was guaranteed to pass muster because of the improper use of the test, regardless of the amount of contamination."
James Craig, a Chevron spokesperson, responded to the claims by telling The News that the plaintiffs' lawyers were once again "deliberately disseminating false information to mislead the media - with no new data or analysis, to try to discredit the effective remediation conducted by Texpet in Ecuador's Amazon in the mid-1990s."
Craig noted that Ecuador's government had agreed (in 1995) to set 1000 mg/LTCLP-TPH as the baseline limit for remediation. The spokesperson also stated that the TCLP method is still used today (though with a limit of a few ppm) as the analytical method for drilling (reserve) pit closure.
"Remediation work done by Texpet on 161 sites in its former concession area in Ecuador was scrutinized at the time by government officials and experts from the Central University in Quito," said Craig. "In 1998, Ecuadorian government signed off on the work and granted a full and final release freeing the Company of future environmental liability and obligations in the former concession area. The release and clean-up was subsequently investigated twice by Ecuador's prosecutor generals and found to have been effective and complete."
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