City of Neodesha v. BP Corp. North America, Inc.

Hill, J.:

Everything in our world moves. This means the pollutants and poisons produced by a century of oil refining rarely stay in one place, safely secured in some snug unseen underground cell. Instead, such noxious compounds slowly migrate, leaching from one substratum to another. No neighbor is safe from this march of toxins. These‘moving subsurface fields of pollution, euphemistically called “plumes” by some, are dangerous for these feathers are toxic.

Fortunately, what is done by human effort can be, for the most part, undone by human effort. Messes can be cleaned up. Pollutants, even…