Ramsey was not fined for its water violations, for example, though a Ramsey official said that filtration systems have been installed since then.
Criminal charges against state and local officials for drinking water violations are unusual, Uhlmann said, and most involve civil cases against a municipality.
Mother Jones, the miner's angel, may be gone, but Mother Jones magazine just called out International Coal Group -- who gave us the Sago, WV tragedy -- for 20,000 clean water violations.
"By not coming right out and saying, 'We oppose all MTR,'" Cordell says, "and instead focusing on stopping KD2, we've been able to educate and raise awareness for thousands of people about water violations in the hope that it carries on in the bigger picture.
And secondly, all coal mining safety laws have been written in miners' blood; the same is true for innocent citizens afflicted by clean water violations by coal and chemical companies.
In 2008 Massey paid $20m in fines levied by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean-water violations.Don Blankenship, Massey's boss, was at first rather blithe about safety violations, calling them "a normal part of the mining process".
The city was charging them too much for water, they argued, in violation of the California Constitution, courtesy of Proposition 218, a taxpayer-revolt law passed in 1996.
In any deal, BP would want to pay penalties as opposed to fines, because penalty payments, like those that cover damages to natural resources, are tax-deductible, while payments for fines, like those for Clean Water Act violations, are not.
The company will start a new program to inspect and maintain slurry pipelines, hire a new "independent monitoring contractor" to carry out environmental improvement portions of the settlement, and agree to an escalating schedule of fines, starting at a minimum of $1,000 for the first citation for future water permit violations.
Two years ago a lawsuit was filed against a Perdue farm for Clean Water Act violations in a case that, for the first time, sought to hold the poultry giant responsible for the wastes from its production system.
