|
Oil Spills: Shell To Pay $410m To Ogoniland
Sun, 07/08/2011
Related story:Clean-up
of Ogoni land to take 30 years, UN report says
In the first case of its kind, a British high court sitting in
London has ordered oil major, Royal Dutch Shell to pay
compensation of potentially more than £250m ($410m) to the Bodo
community of Rivers State, after the Anglo-Dutch oil group
admitted liability for two spills aroun the community, following
a class-action lawsuit brought in England by the Niger Delta
community.
Martyn day of the London- based law firm Leigh Day & Co.
represented the Bodo Community and brought the legal claim for
damages against Royal Dutch Shell plc. (RDS) and its subsidiary,
Shell Petroleum Development Company (Nigeria) ltd. (SPDC).
It was the first time the companies faced claims in England for
damages resulting from their operations in Nigeria.
The lawsuit was filed in England in April this year over two oil
leaks in 2008 and 2009 that caused devastating damage to the
environment and the waterways in particular to the fishing
community of Bodo.
Shell said it was informed of the first leak in early October
2008, but the Bodo community countered that at the time of the
leak the company had pumped oil for about six weeks. Even then
it took Shell over a month to repair the weld defects in one of
its pipelines which had resulted in oil leakages into the
community at an estimated rate of 2,000 bpd.
The oil spill caused massive contamination in the creek, rivers
and waterways in the Bodo area, as well as the mangroves,
causing devastating pollution to the entire area. The damage was
estimated to have affected about 20 square km of Gokana local
government area of Rivers State.
A further spill occurred in December 2008, due to equipment
failure. It was not capped until February 2009, when greater
damage had been inflicted upon the creek, as tens of thousands
of barrels of crude oil were pumped into the surrounding rivers
and creeks.
The amount of oil spilled is estimated to be as large as the
spill that caused the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska in 1989.
The size of the coastline affected is equivalent to that damaged
by the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The total amount of oil spilled was approximately 20 per cent of
the amount leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, following British
Petroleum (BP)’s disaster last year.
In the face of overwhelming evidence of their culpability in the
spills, it took Shell barely four months to accept liability,
rather than go through an expensive litigation, which they will
inevitably lose.
Culled from Leadershipeditors.com
|
