LA Weekly

Decontaminating water tainted by the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) requires installing expensive systems, dliuting the water with other sources or abandoning toxic wells and looking for new ones. Thirty-two million people in California depend on water from sources that are known to contain MTBE, including the San Diego city water utility, which serves 1.2 million people. That's eight times as many people as the next most affected state, New Jersey, with just over 4 million people affected.

Nonetheless, 11 California representatives, including Christopher Cox of Orange County and Buck McKeon of Santa Clarita, voted last week for an energy bill containing a Tom DeLay-engineered provision protecting oil and chemical companies from lawsuits over MTBE. Lois Capps tried to stop the madness -- she put foward an amendment to the energy bill removing the MTBE lines -- but she fell short just a few votes. The bill itself ultimate passed with a margin of over 60 votes.

Yikes. It's hard to understand the other side of this one, and it's even harder when you look at how necessary legal action against big oil has been in the past: In 2003, Santa Monica settled its suit against Shell, Chevron and Exxon after MTBE seeped into wells that once supplied half of the city's water. The wells were shutdown in 1996, and the oil companies pay $3 million a year for replacement water, in addition to building systems to restore the water quality in the well. (In February, the oil companies also agreed to pay $1.5 million to the EPA for costs incurred in investigating the contamination.) Both Orange County and Santa Clarita have water suppliers in litigation against oil companies.

MTBE has been banned in California for a year, but its concetration in drinking water is still on the rise. Whose supposed to pay to clean it up if the Senate's energy bill passes with the same language intact?

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