| Residents say CSX
polluted community (The Bradenton Herald)
By Scott Radway
December 17, 2004
A long-closed treatment pit for railroad ties owned by CSX Transportation has polluted the groundwater of a rural De Soto County community for decades, a lawsuit filed in county court Thursday argues.
And lawyers for about a dozen residents are seeking $500 million in damages from CSX for what they claim is a continued failure to deal appropriately with the treatment pit that operated from 1913 to 1952.
"This poison has been leaching into the ground for literally about 100 years," said Manhattan attorney Marc Bern, who flew down for a news conference with residents on the court steps.
"This (lawsuit) is about corporations that believe they can get away with it and continue to get away with it," Bern added.
The lawsuit cites damages from health impacts such as cancer deaths to financial losses due to extreme drops in property values in the community known as Hull. CSX, or one of its predecessors, have owned the 25-acre pit site since it was built in 1913, the lawsuit said.
CSX spokeswoman Misty Skipper said the company could not comment on the lawsuit until officials reviewed the case. CSX was informed of the suit Thursday through the media.
"We have yet to be served," Skipper said.
According to a health assessment conducted by the Florida Department of Health in 2002, the site referred to as the Nocatee-Hull Creosote Site is "no apparent public health hazard." The report states the contamination is contained on the site, where no one lives.
Bern disagreed.
"We think that they are entirely wrong. The way they have evaluated the various contaminants is not appropriate," Bern said. "There can be no argument that the creosote pit is continuing to emit poisons."
The center of the controversy, the pit, is described by the plaintiffs as an unlined, open treatment facility. The preservation process involved placing railroad ties into a pit filled with a toxic mixture of coal tar creosote.
Creosote is a "heinous" contaminant, Bern said, including such chemicals as arsenic.
"Thousands upon thousand of pounds of creosote were dumped on the raw earth," Bern said. "It is impossible to know how many people are being exposed to the danger of drinking contaminated water even today as we speak."
There is also evidence that the contamination could have spread through a culvert into the Peace River, a source of drinking water for Punta Gorda, Port Charlotte and the majority of Charlotte County, said local attorney David Carlton.
Carlton started investigating the case several months ago when Hull resident Wayne Wilson reported to him that CSX had erected a fence around the contamination site. That fence cut off about one-quarter acre of his property, Wilson said.
"We were worried to death," Wilson said.
A Department of Environmental Protection official could not confirm after-hours Thursday whether there was an open clean-up file on the treatment pit.
According to the lawsuit, the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation - an agency folded into to DEP in the 1990s - entered into a consent decree with CSX to clean up the site and conduct ongoing monitoring. No date for the order is specified in the lawsuit.
But CSX officials "failed to provide (DER) with the information they knew or should have known as being material to remediation efforts," the lawsuit said.
"The defendants were thus enabled to avoid the burden and expense of undertaking and completing effective remediation and instead performed only minimal remediation that were wholly inadequate," the lawsuit said.
Archie Lamb, an attorney from Alabama who is also working the case, said state and federal regulatory agencies do not have the manpower to effectively deal with the numerous contamination sites out there. Lamb said the lawsuit is the "most effective way" to find justice in Hull.
"We are willing to spend a lot of time and money to get to the bottom of this," Lamb said.
CSX has a month to file a response to the lawsuit, Bern said.
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