Elkhorn Road Water System No. 5 is a mutual water system serving a neighborhood of about 20 homes in a rural area of Monterey County, California. In 2018, the water company discovered dangerous levels of 1,2,3-Trichloropropane (TCP) in its only drinking water well. TCP is a synthetic chemical that was present as an impurity in soil fumigants made exclusively by the Shell Oil and Dow Chemical Companies. These products were used for decades by California farmers, who were unaware of the risks, or even that the products contained TCP.
The community did not have a financially viable way to address the contamination issue. Just installing a treatment system to remove TCP from the community’s drinking water would have had a price tag of nearly $1.5 million (not counting operational and maintenance costs) and even the lower-cost option of drilling a replacement well would have cost around $50,000 per household – and not guaranteed access to safe water.
Elkhorn Road Water System No. 5 turned to SL Environmental Law Group to try to pay these remediation costs by holding the manufacturers that caused the TCP contamination accountable. SL Environmental’s contingency-based fee structure made it financially possible for the utility to pursue litigation to secure the funds to treat the water. The utility would only pay for fees after a trial was won or a settlement was reached, allowing them to pursue this cost recovery strategy without paying for legal fees, or any litigation costs, upfront.
SL Environmental, which has been helping clients affected by TCP for many years, used its deep understanding of the local product distribution networks, historic agricultural practices, and hydrogeology to identify the source of the contamination: the historic use of Shell’s and Dow’s defective fumigant products on nearby fields.
SL Environmental filed a lawsuit on behalf of Elkhorn Road Water System No. 5 against Dow Chemical and Shell Oil in the federal district court in San Francisco, accusing the chemical manufacturers of polluting its groundwater by knowingly manufacturing and selling pesticides contaminated with TCP.
In March 2023, less than two years after SL filled the lawsuit, Elkhorn Road Water System No. 5 reached a settlement with the companies responsible for the contamination. The settlement funds allowed the water company to fully fund the installation of a TCP treatment system and cover its operation and maintenance costs for at least a decade.
But SL Environmental’s support didn’t stop in the courtroom. Given the firm’s 20+ years of experience working with hundreds of water systems affected by contamination, Elkhorn Road Water System No. 5 was able to benefit from their guidance throughout the whole process.
"Utilities and their consumers shouldn’t have to pay for the mistakes of polluters. SL Environmental Law Group really understands that and all of the issues that affect water systems, even small community systems like ours. SL handled everything, from identifying where the contamination came from, to figuring out the specifics of the treatment plant we would need to treat it, including all of the associated costs, to dealing with the big chemical companies and their lawyers. We settled in a short time and were able to secure funds to cover all our costs."
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