Faulty Pipe Costs Firms $50 Million : Lawsuit: Jurors find Shell Chemical and two other companies at fault for plastic plumbing that popped apart and damaged homes.
A San Diego jury ordered Shell Chemical Co. and two other companies to pay almost $50 million in punitive damages to homeowners and a developer for water damage caused by faulty plumbing pipe that the companies manufactured.
The class-action lawsuit was brought by 41 San Diego homeowners and the builder of the Briarwood Pointe project against Shell Chemical Co., the U.S. Brass unit of Eljer Industries Inc. and Hoechst Celanese Corp., which manufactured a polybutylene plastic plumbing pipe system that popped open without warning, in some cases causing extensive flooding in homes.
About 6 million homes around the country--including 40,000 in San Diego County--have been built with this plastic pipe system. The pipe has never been legal to install in the city of Los Angeles.
The lawsuit is the largest to be decided of suits filed in Texas, Florida and other Sun Belt states.
Reuben Gawara, the homeowner who organized the San Diego suit, was serving on a U.S. Navy guided missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf in 1985 the night the ceiling in his house fell in.
A flexible plastic plumbing system had burst in the attic. And over the next six years, the system would break above his den, family room and elsewhere around the home, ruining carpets, furniture and personal effects. Gawara finally turned to the courts.
While the pipe was legal in San Diego at the time it was installed, the county withdrew permission to use it in 1992.
The pipe--which is gray and flexible, unlike the more common polyvinyl chloride, or PVC pipe--was marketed particularly in the late 1970s and early ‘80s as being cheaper and easier to install than conventional copper tubing. It was designed to be used in attics and inside walls.
Most of the pipes and fittings were sold under the brand name Qest Qick Sert II, manufactured by U.S. Brass. Other smaller manufacturers of similar systems--which were not named in the suit--include Vanguard Plastics and Wesflex Manufacturing.
The class-action suit successfully contended that the companies committed fraud in marketing the pipe system despite knowing that fittings could pop open without warning.
“Some of those leaks started a year after the homes were built and they continue to this day,” said Tracy Nation, a member of the trial team from the San Diego law firm of Gray, Cary, Ames & Frye, which represented the plaintiffs.
Shell spokeswoman Dee Dee Taylor said Friday: “We are disappointed with the results and intend to pursue avenues to have the verdict set aside. We feel Shell acted responsibly and that the facts do not support the finding of punitive damages.” Taylor says Shell’s attorneys are preparing a motion for a new trial, to be filed within days.
The homeowners will receive $317,000 of the punitive damages, while the developers will receive about $48 million.
