A local judge assigned a trial date Monday for the largest PCB pollution case in Calhoun County, involving 3,500 clients. It will go to trial Oct. 1.
Where and how the case will be tried hasn't been determined, said Circuit Court Judge Joel Laird.
Plaintiffs' attorney Donald Stewart filed the case in 1996 after residents learned that their properties and bodies were contaminated with Monsanto's, now Solutia, PCBs.
Stewart wants the trial moved to Etowah County. Monsanto attorneys want the case tried in Cherokee, Blount or DeKalb.
What number of individual claims will be presented in the trial is another big question, attorneys said.
"We may take a representative sampling of the plaintiffs, like was recently done in the federal PCB case," Laird explained. The case he was referring to, Owens vs. Monsanto, was settled in Birmingham a month ago.
Another issue is injunctive relief.
Stewart said he plans to incorporate his plaintiff's request for injunctive relief - immediate removal of PCBs from contaminated portions of western Anniston - in the trial.
Laird appointed Rick Kuykendall, a Birmingham attorney, to examine the best way to handle the injunctive relief request last year. Kuykendall has not made recommendations yet, Laird said.
The injunctive relief issue is complicated by the presence of environmental regulatory agencies in Anniston, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, who will eventually come to their own determinations on how the PCB-contaminated areas in Calhoun County should be fixed, Laird said.
Laird said he hopes to address these and all of the other remaining questions by June 1. "That will give the attorneys four months to prepare," he said.
He said he originally thought the case would take about three years to get to trial. Instead, it took five years.
The case was stalled for almost two years in the Alabama Supreme Court. The higher court recently rejected Monsanto's 1998 request to intervene in the case, shortly before the Calhoun County trial was to begin.
"A great deal has happened while the case sat around," Laird said, referring to the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund investigation and growing public awareness of Anniston's PCB problems.
"We can't just pick back up where we left off," he added.
Laird said he'll be working "extra hard" to free up his case schedule in preparation for the October case.
Recently, Monsanto settled two PCB cases, one in St. Clair County and the other in the U.S. District Court in Birmingham, for an approximate combined sum of $80 million.
At this time, there are at least 20 pending court cases against Monsanto/Solutia involving similar PCB-related claims.
Stewart's case, which is a combination of three original cases - Abernathy vs. Monsanto, Long vs. Monsanto and Nelson vs. Monsanto - asks for medical monitoring and financial compensation for property damages and personal injuries to his clients.
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