Shell vs.The Environment & The Public Trust

"It's only when we look at things exactly the way they are, that a light develops
by which we know the right way to proceed" 

The Author

My name is Robert Armstrong. I started the first company operated food mart in the history of Texaco (at Second & Oakdale, La Mesa, CA). I owned my own Texaco station. I grew up working in my father's Shell station. I consult for an underground construction company that did all the underground work for the Ontario Mills Mall (largest mall West of the Rockies). This is important because we use "ground penetrating radar" to discover what is in the ground before digging (see The Solution and Proving the Truth).

That the 2nd most profitable company in the world claims it cannot find two large car hoists and a buried toxic garage sump at a gas station, yet this "good ole country boy" could find it in a day, just "doesn't pass the smell test." There is no reason Shell cannot discover the truth at the two Shell stations in Corona, if it wanted to. The reason Shell cannot find the truth is that Shell does not want to test and remediate the 13,000 stations Shell became responsible for when it purchased Texaco. With the record profits it is making, do we really want to let Shell walk away from the responsibility it is fraudulently trying to avoid by not doing a proper test in Corona? - especially when the station in question is only 957 feet from a clean water aquifer we all drink from?

I have been trying to get Shell to clean up the Texaco problem for going on two years now. You can go to "Press Relations" to see the complete file of that correspondence. On April 19, 2006 I had a telephonic meeting with the President of Shell Oil Products US, David Sexton; Shell's lead environmental attorney, Kathleen Gillmore; and the Western Regional Manager, William Spurgeon. Shell acknowledged the problem in that meeting when David Sexton became agitated and said "Shell did not create this problem." That is true, but Shell inherited the liability for the problem when Shell bought the 13,000 Texaco stations in the Shell Texaco merger. David Sexton asked "if we fix the problems in Corona will that take care of it?" I answered "no," because Shell needs to find out how many other stations are similarly affected and remediate those too. Shell does not want to do that, because Shell has been selling all their stations as fast as they can. That Shell would sell all its stations, including the dirty Texaco stations, as a means to not take care of the environment is the reason SeeitReal.com was created. Shell needs to be accountable for its lack of corporate responsibility and clean up whatever former Texaco and Shell stations it needs to; and be responsible for future "UST" (gasoline containment) failures, whether Shell owns the dirt or not.