The federal government on Thursday reached a $5.15 billion settlement with Anadarko Petroleum Corp., the largest ever for environmental contamination, to settle claims related to the cleanup of thousands of sites tainted with hazardous chemicals for decades, according to Reuters.
The $4.4 billion will pay for environmental cleanup and be used to settle claims stemming from the legacy contamination, Reuters reported. The settlement resolves a legal battle over Tronox Inc., a spinoff of Kerr-McGee Corp., a company Anadarko acquired in 2006.
The Justice Department said Kerr-McGee, founded in 1929, left behind a long legacy of environmental contamination: polluting Lake Mead in Nevada with rocket fuel, leaving behind radioactive waste piles throughout the territory of the Navajo Nation, and dumping carcinogenic creosote in communities throughout the East, Midwest and South at its wood-treating facilities, according to Reuters.
The company then shifted the liabilities between 2002 and 2006 into Tronox, the Justice Department said, Reuters reported.
"Kerr-McGee's businesses all over this country left significant, lasting environmental damage in their wake," Deputy Attorney General James Cole said, according to Reuters. "It tried to shed its responsibility for this environmental damage and stick the United States with the huge cleanup bill."
The settlement releases Anadarko from all claims against Kerr-McGee and all settlement funds will be paid into a trust that covers cleanup of contaminated sites across 22 states and the Navajo Nation, Reuters reported.
Among the sites targeted for cleanup under the settlement are a former chemical manufacturing site in Nevada that has led to contamination of Lake Mead and a Superfund property in Gloucester, N.J., contaminated with thorium, according to Reuters.
Almost $1 billion will be directed to the Navajo Nation to address radioactive waste left behind by the region's abandoned uranium mines, Reuters reported. The U.S. initially sought $25 billion to clean up decades of contamination at dozens of sites.
A U.S. bankruptcy judge in New York in December found Kerr-McGee had improperly shifted its environmental liabilities to Tronox and should pay between $5.15 billion and $14.2 billion, plus attorney's fees, according to Reuters.
