BNSF sued for cancer

Trains Magazine General Discussion
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[quote]

Cancer Suit Against Texas Plant Begins
Tuesday January 8, 4:05 pm ET
By David Koenig, Associated Press Writer

First Cancer Lawsuit Against Railroad Tie Plant Begins FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- Testimony began Tuesday in the first of a flurry of lawsuits in which residents of a small Central Texas town claim their cancers were caused by toxic pollution from a century-old plant that makes railroad ties.

Lawyers suing BNSF Railway Co. say the company kept workers and residents of Somerville in the dark about dangers from chemicals such as creosote and arsenic, some of which were buried, burned or dumped in creeks.

“The railroad had a dirty little secret, and they buried it in a place where they didn’t think anyone would look, listen or care,” said Jared Woodfill, a lawyer for a 50-year-old woman who blames BNSF for her stomach cancer.

Linda Faust and her husband, who had worked at the plant for more than 30 years, are seeking at least $6 million in damages.

Railroad lawyer Douglas Poole said there is no scientific evidence linking Linda Faust’s cancer to the chemicals used at the plant, and instead pointed to her smoking habit.

“She never worked at the tie plant,” Poole told jurors during his opening statement. “Her husband did. He’s fine.”

The trial in state district court is expected to last four weeks and is being watched closely as a bellwether for up to 200 similar lawsuits filed by Somerville residents and plant workers against BNSF and Koppers Inc.

BNSF is a unit of Fort-Worth based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., which sold the plant to Pittsburgh-based Koppers in 1995 but remains its largest customer.

The plant has been a cornerstone of the economy in Somerville, 90 m

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You have another case here of the so called DEEP POCKETS SYNDROME. Lawyer sees a client looks at their background and goes after those with the deepest pockets for whatever they think they will settle for. Trouble is every now and then you run into a company like BNSF that will fight and make you earn every penny you get out of them.

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Remember the bizarre $11 (?) billion verdict in the 1980s Houston trial between Texaco and Pennzoil, regarding the Getty Oil buyout?

Anyone who thinks that rubes are powerless in this society should read up on the impact those 12 jurors had. What a disaster.

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Amen - Santa Fe and Kirby Lumber were more than a little obsessed with the toxic aspects of the treating plant. Especially where large amounts of chemical were involved. (My experience goes back into the eighties)…Looks like this ambulance chaser and his client are counting on deep pockets and finding a jury pool that has been tainted by the less than informed media hysteria over treated timber. If the person chose to ignore what he was told, that’s his problem.

Sommerville was hardly the only tie plant on the railroad over the years. When issues with creosote (in concentrated quantity) were first recognized in the 1960’s, they centralized the treating plants at two locations, and then one at Sommerville. The closed plants were hardly forgotten and ignored - the railroad remediated and kept after the older sites at Las Vegas, Albuquerque, etc. (still does, UP managed a similar program)…

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Anybody who has not lived in a hole all their lives knows creosote is very nasty stuff and can and does cause all kinds of conditions, including cancer if exposed long enough. This is clearly a case of ambulance chasing.

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Interesting, a lifetime of Smoking had nothing to do with it, yeahhh…right!

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It is unfortunate that in these cases you are 100% guilty until proven innocent. Normally, I don’t side with big business and I’m not just siding with BNSF because I’m a shareholder. The rewards given in these types of cases are more often than not ludicrous. Everyone says that emotions are priceless, but they always seem to be worth millions when suing someone. I will be happy if justice is served, but it is more likely to be revenge.

If damages are awarded, it would be poetic justice for the companies to produce the funds by laying off all the employees and liquidating the factory.

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BNSF should just consider themselves lucky, I guess. After all, they could be getting sued for $3 quadrillion. [:P]

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It wouldn’t surprise me if she was a user of chewing tobacco which is a proven cause of cancer, including stomach cancer. How about all that hot spicy Tex-Mex food they eat down there?

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Smoking causes stomach cancer?

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News item:

BN has already settled one case out of court:

“A case filed by one-time employee Don Hightower has settled for an undisclosed amount, just before he died from cancer that ate away at his face.”

There was a genuine management problem at this plant:

“In a court deposition, former plant superintendent Gene Welch said he was unaware creosote might require special handling. “… you know, I don’t know that I ever had anybody come to me and complain about creosote hurting (them).””

One worker went to work at the railway in 1971 and served on the Railway Safety Committee. “Nobody ever addressed us about the chemicals.” “We never had the proper equipment to keep the vapors and fumes from breathing them.”

“Creosote can pose a significant danger to soil and groundwater supplies, if mishandled. Once it enters the soil or groundwater, it begins to break down, which can take years.”

“According to records at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the plant is still struggling to clean toxic waste from groundwater.”

Interesting that people here find profound human suffering and death not tragic enough whatever the cause, that because a railroad is involved the suffering should be intentionally multiplied and compounded by the “poetic justice” of a layoff and losing medical coverage as well.

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Dad died of smoking related cancer, care to guess where his cancer was?

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No, but according to a couple of web sites I visited, neither does creosote.

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I don’'t care to get into an argument with you. I don’t happen to agree that anyone’s experience, with your Father or otherwise, justifies mocking terminally suffering people because they smoked or ate spicy food and that breathing burning creosote residue in the air, or drinking the creosote in the drinking water was somehow their fault too.

Every time this stuff comes up, some of you treat people’s deaths like a spectator sport and try and figure out how many ways the victim must have “deserved” their pain, suffering, agony and death. I find it repulsive and offensive.

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Incomplete combustion of creosote creates polycyclic aromatic byproducts. These have been positively identified to cause skin, lung, stomach, liver, colon and bladder cancers in laboratory animals. It is assumed that there can be a link to human cancers of the same type, but as always, human “testing” cannot be carried out, creosote contamination and its long term effects on humans is difficult to measure because of the very isolated population samples, and pockets of unusual cancers like this one appears to be generally are one of the rare “samples” that health authorities get a chance to look at, often as the result of lawsuits bringing the matter to the attention of health authorities.

Less is known about creosote breakdown in groundwater because the conditions are quite variable. These plants are often associated with PCP treatment as well, and Dioxin is a known by-product, which is fat soluble, highly toxic, and accumulates in body tissues.

News item:

"Sitting in a Fort Worth courtroom, Linda Faust scribbled the names of sick friends and neighbors on a sheet of notebook paper.

"Joe Moya, Patricia Thomas and Frank Kromar have colon cancer. Holly Monk, Victor Fonseca and Bud Archer have lung cancer. Dale Davis, Elaine Flannigan and Mary Archer, like Faust, have been diagnosed with stomach cancer.

"Seventy-six names in all.

"What do they have in common? They’ve lived, worked or had a loved one employed at the huge railroad tie plant in the small Central Texas town of Somerville.

""We’ve got 13 streets in our town, and if you go up and down them, there is cancer after cancer after

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Michael the whole premise of the lawsuit is highly suspect. No one is cla

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My POINT was that the smoking is more that likely the primary cause of the plaintifs illness, creosote might be a contributing factor, but smoking has a very well documented cancer link compared to non-smokers going back 50 years. If this person wasn’t a smoker I would be more inclined to your POV.

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How can anyone demonstrate that a cancer was rooted in a given cause? There is no way except that we have accepted that smoking causes a great deal of the lung, tongue, and esophageal cancers we see, but so does alcohol…or so I heard years ago…maybe they’ve changed their minds. But that’s my point, we don’t really know. We assume that a lung cancer was caused by a person’s smoking, but we don’t know.

My mother died a few years back from a rare cancer that effectively forced her to starve to death…it was a lyo-myo-sarcoma…extremely rare and highly resistant, as are all myo-sarcomas, to radiation therapy. The tumour was at the side of her esophagus, and it slowly grew to squeeze it shut. She had undergone several rounds of dental implantations over the preceding three years, the result of an auto accident. Was there something about the compounds used in her implant treatment, maybe the various X-rays that led to her cancer? Who is to say.? Maybe auto accidents are at the root of some cancers since they precede them in many instances. Pos hoc, ergo propter hoc.

I know my mother, though. She would not sue her endodontist because she suspected his service to her had led to her untimely demise. She really wanted to have a realistic smile, and smile she did, even as she lay dying.

-Crandell

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A town with a tie treatment plant, a town practically saturated in creosote, and the creosote came from somewhere else?

And this was the only town that used creosote treated joists – or had a high incidence of cancer from them?

Whew, a creosote plant, dioxin, a chip burner with no pollution controls, old ties burned out in the open, a creosote-polluted water supply, the plant manager didn’t know that creosote was dangerous, the safety committee was never told anything about the stuff, 200 people in a town of 1700 have [or had] various rare cancers … and the railroad had “nothing to do with it?”

News item:

Some workers in Somerville say that … workers there handled creosote with their bare hands and wore it home on their clothes. They say workers even burned treated ties at night, spreading what they say were toxic fumes over the town.

Now, some say that exposure is killing them.

“The problem is we don’t know what we’re catching because every cancer seems to be some rare form of cancer,” said Dennis Davis, who can rattle off more than two dozen people from Somerville with cancer. "It’s like a p

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With statistics.

It is rare, for instance, for people to die of mesothelioma. When a cluster of people do, there is a problem, and spicy food isn’t one of them …

News Item:

The large number of deaths in Libby, Montana gave rise to concern in the health department. In collaboration with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, studied the mortality statistics for Libby, Montana for a 20 year period from 1979 to 1998.

It was noticed that most of the people were dying of respiratory diseases, lung cancer, mesothelioma, digestive cancer and diseases of pulmonary circulation. Most of these people died decades after working in asbestos mines. It was concluded that most of these diseases and deaths were the direct result of asbestos exposure from vermiculite mine.

In this regard, death certificates were also reviewed to judge the accuracy of such claims. Most of these certificates were witness to the fact that people living in Libby had died from various lung and respiratory diseases and mesothelioma due to asbestos exposure. This 20 year period review also showed that the mortality rate in Libby was up to 40% to 60%, higher than other states of the US.