Occidental Petroleum

In 1997, Oxy and three other companies (AMVAC, Dow and Shell) together agreed to pay $41.5 million as part of an out-of court settlement following a joint action lawsuit brought by banana workers in Central America and the Philippines. The workers had been exposed to a pesticide called dibromochloropropane (DBCP), which was developed in the 1940s and used in banana fields in Central America and other places since at least the 1960s until the 1980s. Production of DBCP was suspended by the EPA in 1977 after a third of the workers at Occidental's manufacturing plant in Lathrop, Calif., were found to be sterile. EPA made the ban permanent in 1979, finding that the pesticide caused sterility in humans and an increased risk of cancer and genetic damage.

Before that, DBCP was a very popular nematocide, a pesticide that kills microscopic worms in the soil. It was used in the pineapple plantations in Hawaii and all the banana plantations in Central America, Ecuador, the Philippines and Africa. It was used extensively in California, Florida, Texas and other states growing fruits and vegetables. In addition to exposed workers, the town of Sanger in California's Central Valley won a $15 million settlement in 1993 from Dow, Shell and Occidental for contaminated well water.

A special issue of the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health in 1999 included papers from symposium on DBCP and worker sterility (IJOEH, Vol 5, No 2, April/June 1999).

On January 10, 2007, residents living near Occidental's Muscle Shoals facility filed a class action lawsuit against the company, alleging that the plant contaminated their property with mercury used to manufacture chlorine.