The Most Cajun Place on Earth ( Louisiana's oil-pollution lawsuits )
by Ken Silverstein ( October 16, 2013 )
Since oil was struck near the town of Jennings in 1901, the energy industry has transformed and defined Louisiana environmentally, geographically, and politically. It has drilled some 220,000 wells, built 600 producing oil fields, and constructed 8,000 miles of access canals and pipelines, most of which run through wetlands.
Hundreds of Louisiana landowners have sued oil companies they leased their land to for vast damages, alleging that their properties were badly polluted. As I write in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine, these “legacy lawsuits” are a hot political issue, and in recent years the energy industry has been furiously lobbying the state legislature — with a good deal of success — to pass legislation restricting the ability of landowners to go to court.
One of the biggest and bitterest cases involved the Broussard family, which in the late 1990s filed lawsuits against Chevron and other energy-industry defendants. The Broussards’ experts estimated that the cost of fully cleaning up an eighty-acre property the family owned would be $300 million.
To learn more about the case I traveled one morning last March to Abbeville — eighty miles from Baton Rouge and THE MOST CAJUN PLACE ON EARTH, according to a billboard I saw en route. At 11:15 A.M., I found myself waiting impatiently beneath a live oak in front of the white brick courthouse to meet a man named Ron Miguez.
in full: http://harpers.org/blog/2013/10/the-most-cajun-place-on-earth/
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