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From: CHAS membership <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU
Sent: Fri, Feb 4, 2022 9:00 am
Subject: [DCHAS-L] Juries award students, parents, teachers $247 million for toxic exposure at Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe
I missed the title story from Washington state when it came out last fall, but a report on a new PCB in schools sampling initiative in Vermont brought it to my attention. It sounds like the state of Vermont has hired every environmental sampling firm they can find to sample schools for airborne PCBs. (Full disclosure: my sons attended the high school in Burlington, VT that is now closed; they don't seem to have be impacted by the PCBs there.)
- Ralph
Juries award students, parents, teachers $247 million for toxic exposure at Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe
Nov. 12, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated Dec. 20, 2021 at 10:03 am
Students and parents who say they suffered brain injuries from exposure to toxic chemicals at a Monroe public school were awarded $62 million by a jury on Wednesday in the second successful lawsuit involving noxious conditions at the school.
More than 200 students, parents and teachers from Sky Valley Education Center, an alternative school southeast of Snohomish, allege in a series of lawsuits that they were poisoned by leaky light ballasts laden with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a type of now-banned chemical that is linked to several illnesses.
They've filed 22 lawsuits in all against Bayer Pharmaceuticals, which in 2018 acquired chemical giant Monsanto, once the sole manufacturer of PCBs, with the first two resulting in jury verdicts of $247 million combined. The rest are awaiting trial.
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The plaintiffs say they developed neurological problems, skin lesions, cancer, hormonal diseases and other illnesses after months or years on campus.
"So many students and teachers had to leave Sky Valley because they were just getting too sick," said Michelle Leahy, a former teacher and a plaintiff in the first successful lawsuit involving Sky Valley. In July, a King County Superior Court jury awarded Leahy and two other teachers $185 million in damages.
The plaintiffs in Wednesday's verdict included four former students, two parents and an adult who spent time on campus for a community music program, said Rick Friedman, a Seattle attorney representing Sky Valley plaintiffs.
Bayer Pharmaceuticals said in a statement that it disagrees with the jury verdicts in both cases. It plans to file an appeal of the Wednesday verdict, as it did with the July verdict.
The $247 million awarded so far includes compensatory and punitive damages. Washington state doesn't typically allow punitive damages in this type of case, but plaintiffs' lawyers successfully argued that laws in Missouri, where Monsanto was headquartered, applied to the case.
The company said students and parents weren't exposed to unsafe levels of PCBs, and instead were exposed to "normal" levels found in U.S. populations. "We continue to believe that=E2=80-the undisputed evidence in this case does not support the conclusions that plaintiffs were exposed to unsafe levels of PCBs … or that any exposure could have possibly caused their claimed injuries," the statement reads.
PCBs were a fixture in electrical equipment until they were banned by federal officials in 1979. The chemical compound is among the most widely studied environmental toxin, with research linking PCB exposure and a number of diseases, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"The national tragedy is this stuff is still in an estimated 30% of schools," Friedman said. He cited a 2016 report by U.S. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, which found that as many as 14 million students nationwide might be exposed to PCBs in old electrical equipment or building materials on campuses.
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