SYDNEY, Aug. 3 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian seaweed farmers are taking the Australian subsidiary of Thailand's national petroleum explorer to court after an oil spill in the Timor Sea devastated the local industry.
Acting on behalf of over 13,000 Indonesian seaweed farmers from Indonesia's Nusa Tenggara Timur province (NTT), Australian lawyers filed a 200 million Australian dollar (151.94 million U.S. dollar) class action lawsuit in Sydney's Federal Court on Wednesday claiming the company responsible for Montara oil rig explosion in August 2009 were negligent, and thus are entitled to compensation.
"Things were going really well for their community, and in fact, they had a bumper year in 2008, but toward the end of 2009 everything stopped and their crops died,"lawyer acting on their behalf, Maurice Blackburn principle Ben Slade, told Australia's national broadcaster.
"It was really quite a horrific incident and the company has for many years now tried to avoid compensating the Indonesians who suffered so greatly."
It took approximately 10-weeks for the spill that gushed 300,000 litres of oil per day to be plugged following the Montara's blowout in Australian waters, approximately 250 kilometers south east of Rote Island (NTT), becoming Australia's worst offshore petroleum disaster.
The rig's operator, the Australian subsidiary of Thailand's national petroleum exploration and production company PTTEP, have consistently accepted responsibility for the accident, but deny oil reached Indonesian shores.
PTTEP Australasia also claim an independent analysis it commissioned following the spill shows no lasting impact on the highly sensitive and diverse ecosystem.
"We are confident the results of these independent studies would stand up to the highest scrutiny, as would our assertion that it is reasonable to extrapolate from the studies that if the reefs closest to Montara where the oil and dispersant concentrations were at their greatest did not show lasting impacts, then it is highly improbable that the seas and coastline of NTT would have been impacted,"PTTEP Australasia said in a statement on Wednesday.
In 2013, PTTEP Australasia said the Timor Sea was given"a clean bill of health"following a series of studies by the Montara Environmental Monitoring Program. The program was developed in partnership with Australian authorities.
But relying on Indonesian tax records, the farmers had taken many years to get back to any sense of normal seaweed production following the spill, Slade said, though conceded it would be difficult to prove.
"This case is replete with many problems. The analysis of the losses is difficult, but there are records, people paid tax," Slade said.
"The records are there, it's just a big job to get it together."
Indonesia's seaweed industry is world leading and used in a variety of products from foodstuffs to cosmetics and medicine.
