The plaintiffs suing Chevron in Ecuador have spent the past six months imploring the press to focus on the evidence in the case rather than the fraud alleged against them.
When I at last did so, plaintiffs took issue with some of my conclusions. Though their letter makes some valid points, it does not shake my conclusions that their headline oil number is a fantasy, and their proof of groundwater pollution (as opposed to soil pollution) is weak.
Plaintiffs are simply unable to defend the claim that Texaco dumped 332 million gallons of oil, which, as they have repeated, is 30 times greater than the Exxon Valdez spill (which released 11 million gallons of oil), and even greater than the BP Gulf spill. In their letter, plaintiffs point out that the 16.8 million gallon number I cited from World Watch Institute only covers spills from the main pipeline, and not secondary spills, or oil contained in produced water. That’s a fair point, as far as it goes.
