Exxon Mobil has told a federal judge that its participation in a laboratory’s report on the cause of a Mayflower oil spill was appropriate and transparent.
Recently unsealed documents filed in the lawsuit showed that Exxon Mobil had successfully proposed numerous changes to the Texas laboratory’s report on what caused the oil giant’s Pegasus pipeline to crack on March 29, 2013.
Attorneys for the Mayflower property owners who sued Exxon Mobil after the spill have contended that the documents showed that Exxon Mobil had committed a “fraud upon the public” when it described the report as “independent.”
Exxon Mobil, however, countered in a response filed in U.S. District Court in Little Rock this week that the company’s “actions were entirely proper” and cited a report quoting a spokesman for the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, as saying the agency typically allows pipeline companies to propose “minor” changes to such reports.
Exxon Mobil Pipeline Co. “simply followed PHMSA’s … approved, commonly employed, and publicly known procedures and protocols … in proposing revisions to the draft of [the Hurst Metallurgical Research Laboratory] report,” attorneys for the oil company wrote in the filing Monday.
“Defendants have not committed a ‘fraud upon the public,’ as the plaintiffs have falsely claimed,” they added. “The process of making the revisions in question to Hurst’s draft report was transparent and representative of [the pipeline company’s] cooperative efforts with PHMSA throughout the investigation of the Mayflower incident.”
Exxon Mobil said its “communications with Hurst were conducted in a manner that fully respected the independent nature of Hurst’s testing and analysis processes.”
“In short, this is just another example of plaintiffs making false, inflammatory allegations that they cannot support.”
Marcus Bozeman, an attorney for the Mayflower landowners who filed the lawsuit, did not back off the allegation Tuesday.
“Whether or not PHMSA knew about Exxon participating in preparing the report, the fact still remains that the report was not independent,” as Exxon Mobil had said it was, Bozeman said.
“Nothing about the protocols or procedures established by the federal government presupposes that Exxon [would] play a role in the actual writing of the report,” Bozeman added.
Also, the two sides are continuing to battle over whether Exxon Mobil should provide more information to help the plaintiffs notify property owners along the Pegasus of the lawsuit.
Exxon Mobil spokesman Christian Flathman said Tuesday that the company already has given the plaintiffs a database.
“We have complied with the court’s order and provided our database which includes all addresses along the centerline of the northern segment of the Pegasus pipeline,” Flathman said in an email interview.
“We provided more than is required. However, that data is in that list,” he added.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs, however, have been trying to get Exxon to provide a more narrowed database with the help of a software system.
Exxon Mobil has countered that the request should be denied, as it says it already has given the plaintiffs all of the relevant information.
Bozeman declined further comment Wednesday but said another document would be filed soon on that issue.