Final Settlement Is Approved in Waste Dump Case

Ending 11 years of litigation, a final $13.5-million settlement will be paid for damages caused by the Stringfellow acid pits, one of the most notorious toxic waste dumps in the nation, both sides said Thursday.

The out-of-court settlement will be paid by an insurance company for the state of California, the last remaining defendant in the convoluted civil case that involved about 3,800 plaintiffs. They were residents of Glen Avon, a small blue-collar community just west of Riverside who lived a mile downstream from an unlined rock quarry that from 1956 to 1972 served as a dumping ground for 35 million gallons of industrial chemicals.

The settlement brings the total damages to $109 million to be paid to the plaintiffs--including the families of people who died of cancer allegedly caused by living close to the chemical dump.

“I’m very pleased,” said Penny Newman, the lead plaintiff in the case, which began in 1984 and has generated 3 million court exhibits and documents. The Stringfellow case has 500 attorneys of record. The litigation has cost the residents more than $30 million even before attorneys take their contingency fees.

“Having an 11-year-old trial come to a close is very exciting. I think we’ve done pretty well,” Newman said.

Doug Weliber, attorney for the plaintiffs, called the settlement “satisfactory and reasonable, given the diversity of injuries, and represents to my knowledge one of the largest settlements of a toxic tort case in the history of the United States.”

The cash awards will be distributed to the individual plaintiffs early next year under the direction of Francis McGovern, a University of Alabama law professor who specializes in the distribution of mass-tort awards.

The final settlement was mediated with the help of J. Lawrence Irving, a retired federal district judge from San Diego. The pact must be formally approved by Riverside Superior Court Judge Erik Kaiser, who presided over a seven-month trial last year that resolved the cases of 17 of the litigants.

In that trial, jurors found the state culpable for damages--but awarded only $160,000 of the $3.1 million in damages sought by the 17 people. Eight of the 17 plaintiffs won nothing, and the largest award--$43,228--went to a man who claimed emotional distress because of well-documented breathing difficulties.

“The settlement is being paid out of consideration of the fact that if we were to try 17 cases a year until all the cases were concluded, we’d be in the year 2530,” said Howard Halm, an attorney who represented the state.

The other $96 million in out-of-court settlements were paid by the 200 or so companies that dumped their industrial processing wastes at Stringfellow, as well as by Riverside County and the owners of the site. The state was named as a defendant because it approved the dump’s operation.

Among the companies that dumped at Stringfellow were General Electric, Alumax Inc., McDonnell Douglas Corp., Rockwell International, Rohr Industries, Alcan Aluminum Corp., Montrose Chemical Co. and Northrop Corp.

Marvin Goldsmith, a senior assistant state attorney general, noted that in the final settlement, the tab will be picked up by the state’s insurance carrier, the Chubb Group of Insurance Cos., and not by taxpayers.

Cleanup of the site continues. Eighteen companies have agreed to pay $150 million toward cleanup costs and the state was ordered to pay 75% of the ultimate costs--estimated at $750 million.