A U.S. District Court judge has ordered BNSF Railway to pay Washington state’s Swinomish Indian Tribal Community nearly $400 million for trespassing on the tribe’s reservation.
The district court ruled in 2023 that BNSF had knowingly violated a 30-plus year-old easement agreement to run no more than 25 rail cars in each direction daily over a mile-long portion of Swinomish tribal lands. BNSF is also required to tell the tribe the nature of any cargo it moves through their lands. According to the court’s ruling, BNSF regularly ran 100-car trains carrying crude oil through the reservation between 2012 and 2021.
Court documents further detail how in 2011, the Swinomish tribe discovered in a county planning document that the railway planned to start moving crude oil over the easement area. BNSF reportedly did not alert the tribe to those plans themselves until 2012, before “unilaterally” increasing the number of trains and cars it would run through Swinomish lands without the approval of the tribe.
Moving forward, the railway will have to pay the tribe $394 million, based on an estimate of the net profits BNSF made from the excess of rail cars.
