Bogus Contamination Suit against TI
I saw this blurb in EE Times today.
Texas residents drop contamination suit against TI
Loring WirbelEE Times
(10/18/2007 9:34 AM EDT)DALLAS — Attorneys representing the Hamilton Park neighborhood, southeast of Texas Instruments Inc.’s headquarters, in North Dallas, have decided to drop a civil lawsuit claiming contamination of residents’ groundwater. Three successive tests of toxic plumes have failed to show plume migration into the neighborhood.
When the suit was filed in June, both the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said they failed to spot significant migration of tricholorethane or trichloroethylene into the area.
TI does not dispute the existence of the plumes on its own campus and nearby areas. But the legal firm of Ted Lyon & Associates decided to dismiss the suit, after three rounds of testing failed to indicate any migration of the plume into the neighborhood, a representative of Ted Lyon told the Dallas Business Journal.
Let me see if I understand this. They filed the suit in June, apparently without verifying that the contamination actually existed in the neighborhood…? Apparently Mr. Lyon and his associates think that they are Erin Brockovich. With legal geniuses like this working our legal system, we’re clearly positioning our domestic industries to compete with China.
It’s kind of ironic. Billions of bytes have been consumed writing about the environmental woes in China. Sadly, in many cases, the local residents are powerless to do anything about the contamination. On the other hand, in the U.S., we haul one of our leading technology companies to court for environmental issues that cannot be shown to actually exist. Perhaps I’m going to have to rethink some of my positions on which country is going to be the dominant economic superpower in the 21st century.
Technorati Tags: China, China Outsourcing
Canada has traditionally kept to itself more than the US - a tendency that probably developed because their enormous wealth of natural resources makes them naturally less reliant on other countries. For instance, they still have laws in place to limit foreign investment. So I’m guessing that while Canada wants to increase its economic ties to Asia, they aren’t persuing that goal as aggressively as the US and some other western countries.
Comment by JT — 2007.11.01 @ 21:26