Multi-Billion-Dollar Environmental Damage Settlement Announced - East Idaho News
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Multi-Billion-Dollar Environmental Damage Settlement Announced

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GETTY 4414 GavelMoney?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1396600761233zimmytws/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — Federal prosecutors Thursday announced that the parent company of energy producer Kerr-McGee has agreed to pay more than $5 billion to settle environmental contamination claims related to its mining, wood treating and other toxic operations.

Deputy Attorney General James Cole said the settlement with Kerr-McGee’s parent, Anadarko, “is the largest recovery for cleanup of environmental contamination in the history of the Department of Justice.”

Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the district of New York, told reporters at a news conference that for 85 years the Kerr-McGee Corporation conspired to shift the burden of cleaning up its pollution to others.

“Whenever possible it ignored or delayed addressing these massive environmental harms and by doing so it put the burden of this contamination on communities, on individuals and on governments throughout the country,” Bharara said.

“If you are responsible for 85 years of poisoning the earth than you are responsible for cleaning it up,” Bharara said.

Cole said money from the settlement will be used to fund ongoing environmental cleanup operations.

He said Kerr-McGee’s wood treating facilities left carcinogenic creosote contamination throughout the East, the Midwest and the South, and its thorium facilities left radioactive soil in the city of Chicago.

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