State Found Liable for Acid Pits Leakage : Courts: But the jury awards less than $160,000, saying many plaintiffs exaggerated injury claims in seeking damages of $3.1 million. The case involved the first 17 of 3,800 Glen Avon residents suing over the Stringfellow toxic site.

Concluding the first civil trial on the largest personal injury lawsuit in the nation over the issue of toxic dumping, jurors Wednesday found the state of California responsible for allowing a witch’s brew of chemicals to escape from the notorious Stringfellow Acid Pits into the nearby community of Glen Avon.

But in a mixed 60-page verdict, the jury concluded that the plaintiffs exaggerated claims of personal injury and property damage caused by the leaking chemical dump. As a result, jurors awarded less than $160,000 of the $3.1 million in damages sought by the plaintiffs.

The verdicts followed a seven-month trial for the first 17 of 3,800 residents of Glen Avon seeking damages from those responsible for creating the worst toxic-waste dump in California. After 20 days of deliberations, the jury concluded that eight of the 17 plaintiffs failed to show they were injured by the proximity of the acid pits, and awarded them nothing.

The largest award--$43,228--went to a man who claimed emotional distress because of well-documented breathing difficulties.

Doug Welebir, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that he was disappointed by the amount of damages, but “it is a great verdict because we have done something that many people said we could never do. . . . We have established that the stuff got out, that my clients were exposed to it, that it caused physical injury.”

He said some of his weakest cases were put on trial because the state was allowed to select four of the 17 plaintiffs. The next trial, tentatively set to begin in 12 months, will include some of the most seriously injured Glen Avon residents, including several who allege they were stricken by cancer because of Stringfellow’s chemicals, Welebir said.

Penny Newman, a Glen Avon resident who is the lead plaintiff in the mammoth case, which has involved 500 attorneys of record, echoed Welebir’s contention that the worst of Stringfellow’s victims are yet to have their day in court.

“This jury was left thinking, because of the cases that went forward first, that there are 4,000 people with only bloody noses and headaches,” said Newman, whose own case is still to be tried. “Now that we’ve shown the state is responsible, the next thing is to show some of the real damages that have occurred.”

But Howard Halm, one of the state’s attorneys, called the verdict “a great victory for the state of California” because it showed that the consequences of the toxic pollution were minimal at worst.

Previously, the 200 or so companies that dumped their industrial processing wastes at Stringfellow agreed to pay $96 million in out-of-court settlements to the Glen Avon plaintiffs. Because the $96 million in settlements are in response to the same lawsuit that also targeted the state for damages, the state won’t have to pay anything to the plaintiffs--including Wednesday’s award of $159,147--until total jury awards in this and the upcoming trials exceed $96 million, Halm said.

The plaintiffs already have spent about one-third of the settlement fund--$32 million--in pursuing their lawsuit.

A federal court previously found the state liable for maintaining dangerous conditions at Stringfellow prior to 1980. Wednesday’s verdict extended the state’s liability after 1980 as well.

During the trial, held before Superior Court Judge Erik Kaiser, the plaintiffs’ attorneys intertwined personal testimony of pain and injury with scientific computer modeling. Their goal was to illustrate the poisonous conditions that they claimed spilled, wafted and drained underground into the rural community, a mile downstream from a onetime rock quarry west of Riverside. From 1956 to 1972, 35 million gallons of industrial chemicals were dumped into unlined ponds by major Southern California manufacturers during an industrial heyday, with the state’s blessing.

But jury Foreman Rudy Klutschkowski said that, because of a combination of witnesses who weren’t credible and esoteric computer studies, “when push came to shove, the plaintiffs didn’t prove” that they were seriously injured.

Klutschkowski said expert witnesses on both sides effectively neutralized each other, and the computer modeling studies were based on so many extrapolations and assumptions--including one that required 15,000 different variables--that they were all but discounted as a foundation of the plaintiffs’ case.

The foreman also chided some of the plaintiffs for claiming injury when the case was filed in 1984, even though they had no prior record of seeking medical help for alleged maladies.

Noting the perceived deep-pocket resources of the state as a target in the litigation, Klutschkowski said, “I personally feel they (plaintiffs) were looking to take everyone they could” with claims for damage.

But there was enough other evidence, including well-water sampling, to confirm that toxins had escaped Stringfellow, he said.

“The state should have been more responsible in the 1980s,” he said.

In a separate action last year stemming from a federal lawsuit, 18 of the largest corporate contributors to the Stringfellow brew agreed to pay $150 million toward the cleanup of the acid pits. The cleanup project, one of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund sites, may ultimately cost upward of $750 million. In that same action, the state of California was told to pay 75% of those costs because it operated the site.

Among the companies that shipped industrial waste to Stringfellow--and later agreed to pay damages to nearby residents--were General Electric, Alumax Inc., McDonnell Douglas Corp., Rockwell International, Rohr Industries, Alcan Aluminum Corp., Montrose Chemical Co. and Northrop Corp.

The only company that refused to accept liability for chemical dumping at Stringfellow was Rainbow Canyon Manufacturing, a now-defunct die-casting firm that insisted on going to trial.

On Wednesday, the jury exonerated the company.

“I felt this case was a winner for the manufacturers from the beginning,” said attorney Rob Kelly. “The other (companies) should have taken their lead from me. I’m a better attorney.”