Featured Case | National MTBE Settlement Provides Protection for Public Drinking Water

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Water is one of our most precious and essential natural resources. It is a symbol of purity. But modern industry has put our water at risk. Water pollution threatens to make our water undrinkable in some areas. A wide range of water contaminants—chemicals like MTBE, solvents like TCE and PCE, fertilizers and pesticides such as atrazine—are a real risk to the quality of our water, and Baron & Budd has stepped up to protect the purity and safety of our water supply.

Scott Summy

Approximately half of American families obtain their drinking water from groundwater: water that collects underground in aquifers and can be recovered through water wells. In some places, a single aquifer is the only source of local drinking water. But the use of Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether (MTBE) beginning in the late 1970s has caused widespread contamination of the water supply in many communities across the country.

Baron & Budd attorneys, led by Scott Summy, one of the most experienced water lawyers practicing today, represent more than 150 public water providers from 17 states who have brought lawsuits demanding that the oil companies pay to clean up the MTBE that has polluted or threatens to pollute their community drinking water. The bulk of the country’s oil refiners have agreed to settle claims by paying a very substantial settlement now and also providing a 30-year well protection plan to guarantee well remediation of MTBE contamination found in the future. ExxonMobil has refused to settle, however, and faces the first of numerous trials over MTBE starting in September.

MTBE was first added to gasoline in 1979 and began to be found in drinking water supplies in 1980-1981. Internal oil company documents discovered by Scott Summy and his colleague Celeste Evangelisti showed that the oil companies knew by the mid-1980s that MTBE would leak out of underground storage tanks and contaminate nearby groundwater. They also knew that MTBE is attracted to water and attaches itself to water molecules, so that it would contaminate water faster and be more difficult to clean up than other ingredients of gasoline. Still, the oil companies ramped up their use of MTBE, making it one of the most widely produced chemicals in the country, and continued adding it to gasoline until 2007. The oil companies just didn’t tell government regulators or the public about the problem.

At extremely low levels, MTBE can give drinking and bathing water the strong taste and odor of turpentine, making it unusable. The Environmental Protection Agency has said that MTBE is an animal carcinogen and a potential human carcinogen. We don’t know more about the health risks of MTBE exposure because, even though the oil companies knew it would get into our drinking water, they never adequately tested what the effects of that exposure could be.

Video: How MTBE gets into the water.

Baron & Budd’s success for its clients in holding the oil companies responsible for polluting America’s water supply is especially gratifying because, just a few years ago, the oil companies nearly convinced Congress to let them off the hook. Twice, in 2003 and 2005, the oil companies tried to get immunity from Congress to avoid paying to clean up the MTBE mess. The amendment was called the “Safe Harbor” Provision in the Energy Bill. Of course, it was anything but safe for our communities’ drinking water. Without the ability to hold the oil companies accountable in court for the MTBE pollution in their groundwater, these water providers would be crippled by the financial costs of cleaning up the water supply and, in most cases, simply couldn’t afford to do the cleanup on their own.