By: Danny Jacobs

I had a bit of a flashback while watching “60 Minutes” the other night. Scott Pelley reported on residents suing an oil company over groundwater contimation, with alleged damages in the billions.

But this wasn’t Jacksonville — and it wasn’t ExxonMobil Corp. Rather, it was Amazon residents in east Ecuador suing Chevron Corp. for $27 billion for damages incurred during more than 20 years of oil drilling. Residents through a New York-based trial lawyer allege Texaco, now a Chevron subsidiary, didn’t clean up hundreds of pits filled with the byproducts of the drilling. Many of the pits have sat untouched for years.

The case, which has been going on for 16 years, will soon be decided by an Ecuadoran judge whose courtroom sits on the third floor of a shopping mall. How the case reached that point was the most interesting part of the story, as producers used old news footage to chart the lawsuit’s course.

The story has been criticized as a “PR job” for the plaintiffs. I wouldn’t go that far, but the video at the end of the story showing oil floating on top of an Amazon River tributary is pretty compelling.