Orange County Water District Sues Oil Companies Over Leaking MTBE

The Orange County Water District has filed suit against a group of major oil companies, seeking money to investigate and monitor the gasoline additive MTBE and stop it from seeping into underground drinking water supplies.

Though no harmful level of the additive -- identified as a likely carcinogen -- has been detected in county drinking water, the district contends that costly monitoring is needed to ensure that the chemical doesn’t settle into the deep aquifers that supply many cities with water.

Dozens of gas stations in the county have leaked gasoline from storage tanks, which has tainted the soil and ground water with MTBE, the water district says.

Defendants in Tuesday’s lawsuit, filed in Superior Court, include Unocal Corp., Chevron USA Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., Atlantic Richfield Co., Texaco Refining and Marketing Inc. and more than 500 unnamed gasoline corporations.

Oil corporations said they could not comment on the lawsuit because their attorneys had not seen it. Three years ago, the Orange County district attorney’s office sued several oil companies, seeking civil penalties and alleging that the firms were responsible for MTBE contamination at 330 gas station sites.

The district attorney’s office reached a settlement with Arco, which agreed to spend millions of dollars cleaning up contamination beneath 143 gas stations. The disposition of the suits against the remaining oil companies could not be determined Wednesday.

While the district attorney’s suits sought to force oil companies to clean up the ground directly beneath or near gas stations, water district officials said they filed suit to protect the much deeper reservoirs.

The water district contends that the oil firms were neither aggressive about nor responsible in monitoring and conducting investigations at the county’s numerous gas station sites with MTBE contamination. Dozens of sites, the suit says, have been contaminated in what the district calls its shallow aquifer.

Gov. Gray Davis has ordered that the chemical be phased out of California gasoline by the end of the year.