Hobbs News-Sun
Sunday, May 25, 2003DOCUMENTS WAITING TO BE SORTED
MICHELLE A. FOX
EOTT employees moved desks, tables, chairs and computers into an office building commandeered for the daunting task of cataloging the thousands documents dug up last week from a closed remediation site southwest of Hobbs.
"We have been asked by the State Land (Office) to do a generalized review of what might be in each box," said Gretchen Weis, EOTT spokeswoman, on Saturday from the Hobbs office.
Meanwhile, EOTT is claiming the documents were buried in 190 burlap sacks in a 45-foot hole just weeks before it bought the pipeline assets and the remediation site from Texas-New Mexico Pipeline.
In addition to the office supplies, EOTT also has to bring in a document restorer to help decipher the moldy, decaying papers and decide what to do with them, meaning the sorting of documents is not expected to begin in earnest until today at the earliest.
"They (the document restorer) has to get here and look at everything," Weis said.
A representative from the State Land Office has also requested to be present for the reviewing process. The documents were buried on state land and the State Land Office has fined EOTT for not notifying the state it was digging up the documents and disturbing a remediation site.
Until this step of reviewing the documents is completed, there is no clear direction of what will come next in EOTT's search for information to help the company defend itself in a lawsuit that was filed against EOTT and Texas-New Mexico Pipeline Co. (TNPC).
The suit was filed in March 2001 after wells in Midland County were found to be contaminated from a pipeline spill that occurred in the early 1990s.
EOTT has always contended it is not responsible for the contamination because it had not yet purchased the portion of TNPC's pipeline assets at the time of the spill. In fact, it would not be until 1999 that the purchase would take place -- a purchase that, according to EOTT officials, occurred only a few weeks after the documents were buried.
"These documents may be important to us for several different reasons," Weis said. "The state may want copies, other companies may want copies, but we will not know until we know what we got."
Other oil companies, such as Royal Dutch/Shell, also hope to find documents to aid them in similar cases. TNPC is a subsidiary of Shell and portions of it were purchased by EOTT, which was at one time a subsidiary of Enron.
And along with the documents that had been buried south of Hobbs, EOTT officials believe there are other documents buried in other undisclosed locations although EOTT spokeswoman Weis could not provide more details of where.
The dig near Hobbs was started on May 15 after a confidential informant told EOTT that the documents it was searching for had been buried in the spring of 1999.
According to this informant he was "personally present when some records were thrown in a hole."
Weis said the eyewitness account states the documents were buried in early to mid-April of 1999. EOTT took formal possession of certain TNPC pipeline assets May 1 of that same year.
"These are definitely the documents that were supposed to be turned over to EOTT by Tex-New Mex when the transaction took place," EOTT attorney Dan Dolan said from Albuquerque.
A common misconception is that EOTT bought out all of Texas-New Mexico Pipeline and that is not the case.
"It is important for people to know that Tex-New Mex still exists as a separate company," Weis said. "We purchased the parts of its pipeline assets that complimented our system."
The buried documents were found in the site south of Hobbs where TNPC and ChevronTexaco had, in 1998, started removing and replacing the soil that had been contaminated by the pipeline spill.
Until the remediation was completed in 2001, the site remained an open 50-foot deep pit. -- providing an easy dumping ground for the 190 sacks of papers.