Western Properties Service Corp. v. Shell Oil Co.

This is a CERCLA contribution case. 1 The appellants were found to have arranged, during the early years of World War II, for the disposal of wastes from aviation fuel production.

FACTS

The property at issue, near Corona, in Riverside County, California, was once a ranch owned by the Wardlows. Gravel had been excavated from the property in 1938 for a nearby dam, leaving four gravel pits. For $2,000, the Wardlows sold the right to dump “acid tar” — petroleum waste consisting in substantial part of sulfuric acid — into those pits. Oil refineries, for over a decade by then, had been going farther and farther afield from their Long Beach locations for disposal sites because the stink of acid tar was notoriously offensive to neighbors. This sludge could be smelled from almost a mile away. Burning did not solve the problem, and the fumes were so bad that they killed flowers and fruit trees. Runoff from the waste made farmland useless and killed fish in nearby streams.

Among the central difficulties in this case is that it is hard to say what the facts are, as the parties could find no living person who knows what happened, and documentary evidence supports nothing more than…