One of the sad but seldom mentioned realities about the U.S. legal system is how it protects corporations by failing to hold them fully accountable for the harms they inflict on ordinary people, and often leave the public to pay for the damages done. All quite legal, of course.
There are hundreds of examples, but a recent one comes from the “Marshall Fire” of January 2022, near our home. The fire destroyed over 1,000 homes in Marshall and Superior, Colorado.
Coal mining began in the area in 1859, sixteen years before Colorado became a state. The area is named after Joseph Marshall, a coal baron, and 51 mines were officially registered there with the state over the course of production. The Lewis Mine operated from 1914 to 1946. Once coal extraction operations ended, the company sold the property to the City of Boulder. Continuous fires in the old coal pits have occasionally surfaced.
Fissures, venting, and the odor of coal combustion were noted during an inspection in 2003. On Dec. 20, 2005, a brush fire was ignited by heat from a vent at the site. That fire was quickly contained and extinguished, the report stated. A temperature reading at the vent registered 373 degrees.
The U.S. Department of the Interior responded by dumping 275 tons of aggregate (small rock) on the site the next month, burying the vents another 18 inches. Additional compaction and grading was done 2016. More vents were found, but their exhaust was “warm, moist air” that only measured 90 degrees, according to the report.
Notice that it’s taxpayer money that has to monitor the situation and “dump the aggregate” into the vents; and, if this was the cause of the fire, then public resources must be devoted to helping the victims, including FEMA funds and money from Colorado’s state treasury. Many helping hands (and monetary donations) are also helping, but not the corporation.
The corporation? The one that left the coal fires burning? Long gone.
Speaking of fires, Pacific Gas & Electric now merits a place in the hall of corporate shame. Its negligence has sparked a number of devastating fires in California.
Writing recently, federal district court Judge William Alsup made numerous damning comments in a court filing, “Final Comments of District Court Upon expiration of PG&E’s Probation.
PG&E was placed on probation in 2017 when it was convicted of six felony crimes connected to one of its natural gas pipelines that exploded in 2010, killing eight people. Since a company can’t go to prison for committing a crime, PG&E faced a $3 million fine and the maximum length of probation.
Since then, PG&E has caused even more devastation, Alsup writes. While on probation, according to Alsup’s report, PG&E was responsible for at least 31 blazes that killed 113 people and scorched 23,956 homes and buildings. The deadliest and most destructive was the 2018 Camp Fire, which burned the town of Paradise to the ground and for which which PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 involuntary manslaughter charges. PG&E faces dozens more charges for other blazes.
You might say, “Well, now there’s some real accountability. But you would be mistaken. No PG&E officer or director or employee responsible for the company’s negligence has lost a loved, one, a home, or had their property destroyed, nor have they gone to jail or paid a fine. The company has paid a fine, but is evidently a “recidivist” who cannot stop breaking the law. Still, the corporate charter is alive and well, and so is the corporation: shareholders will be the ones paying the fine, since the fine will be paid out of PG&E’s earnings.
Good parents teach their kids to clean up when they mess up. A good legal system would make companies clean up their mess before they go on to other pursuits. But ours all too often does not.
Here’s another Colorado story: a few years back, a woman lost her entire family when her house blew up because of an uncapped pipeline that an oil and gas company in Weld County left behind. The photo that accompanies this blog is of that destroyed home in Firestone, Colorado.
From Colorado Public Radio, we learned “National Transportation Safety Board investigators have released their summary of what went wrong on April 17, 2017, when an explosion linked to an oil and gas well in Weld County killed two people and injured one.”
https://www.cpr.org/2019/10/29/ntsb-firestone-house-explosion-report/
“The report states the explosion occurred due to the ignition of natural gas from lines then owned by Anadarko Petroleum Corporation and likely severed during home construction. In a statement on the probable cause of the incident, the report also reads that ‘the approval by local authorities to allow occupied structures to be built on land adjacent to or previously part of oil and gas production fields’ without full documentation of the state or locations of the lines contributed to the accident.”
“It also found that the lines near the residence, which had been previously owned by Patina Oil and Gas Corporation, were not abandoned according to state regulations. Those require that lines be disconnected from the source, cleared of liquid hydrocarbons and sealed at both ends.
The report states “none of the three lines found at the residence were properly abandoned in accordance with these requirements.”
At least in this case there were some consequences. After the accident, the company shut down thousands of wells for additional inspections. The legislature passed new legislation and Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is now rewriting industry rules for underground oil and gas lines in light of the new legislation. The woman who lost her house and family has taken an active role in the process. Besides new rules for transferring ownership, she also thinks the commission should require the removal of abandoned flowlines.
All of that said, however, people should notice that no officer or employee of Patina Oil and Gas (or the company it sold its operation to, Anadarko) has lost a house, a loved one, or any money, unlike the victims of fire in Marshall CO, Paradise CA, or Firestone CO. But that’s just the way the legal system “works.” Or doesn’t, by failing to prevent ongoing disasters.