||| FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS |||
BNSF Railway must pay nearly $400 million to a Native American tribe in Washington state, a federal judge ordered Monday after finding that the company intentionally trespassed when it repeatedly ran 100-car trains carrying crude oil across the tribe’s reservation.
U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik initially ruled last year that the railway deliberately violated the terms of a 1991 easement with the Swinomish Tribe north of Seattle that allows trains to carry no more than 25 cars per day. The judge held a trial earlier this month to determine how much in profits BNSF made through trespassing from 2012 to 2021 and how much it should be required to disgorge.
The company based in Fort Worth, Texas, said in an email it had no comment on the judgment. The tribe, which has about 1,400 members, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The tribe sued in 2015 after BNSF dramatically increased, without the tribe’s consent, the number of cars it was running across the reservation so that it could ship crude oil from the Bakken Formation in and around North Dakota to a nearby refinery. The route crosses sensitive marine ecosystems along the coast, over water that connects with the Salish Sea, where the tribe has treaty-protected rights to fish.
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$400 million seems like pennies on the dollars this company is making. Seems more like a gesture than consequences – still, I’m glad the Tribe won its lawsuit and at least some of the courts are recognizing their rights, and doing something about stopping the continual violations. Stopping these trains from going through the reservation altogether would be even better.
I’d noticed these “unit trains” and heard about the lawsuit from an attorney involved but never imagined the award could be so large. What doesn’t come through in the AP article is the fact that these trains were carrying highly volatile Bakken crude oil, which led to a few explosive incidents when trains carrying it derailed in the last decade. Imagine what might have happened had a derailment occurred right behind the Swinomish Casino, where the tracks go. In that sense, the $395 million award is completely justified, as BNSF was violating the 1991 agreement and endangering US citizens in the process. These were ill-gotten gains.