GADSDEN
Attorney Donald Stewart questioned Solutia's environmental officer about Monsanto's historic handling of PCB issues in Anniston Thursday during the Monsanto trial.
Stewart, who is representing 3,500 plaintiffs who accuse Monsanto and its spinoff, Solutia, of polluting their bodies and properties with PCBs, showed Solutia's Dr. Robert Kaley and the jury Monsanto documents pertaining to worker ailments in Monsanto's Anniston plant as early as the 1930s.
He asked Kaley about a 1944 Monsanto document describing required physical exams for its workers. The document emphasized "gastro-intestinal disturbances and dermatitis, liver function, acute yellow atrophy of liver" related to long-term chemical exposures.
Kaley, a former environmental officer for Monsanto, said it was unclear whether the ailments described in the document were associated with animal or human evidence about PCB exposures. He said PCBs do cause skin problems.
Stewart questioned Kaley about whether the company fully divulged information to researchers and the government about its PCB usage, as a recent press release issued by Solutia claimed. The Solutia press release, issued in early January, included a statement that Monsanto worked with scientists and government officials to learn about the PCB problem "from the earliest emergence of information."
Stewart showed Kaley 1970s-era documents in which Monsanto officials expressed reservations about sharing PCB production volumes with a California scientist and submitting PCB discharges to Snow Creek to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"You weren't being really truthful," Stewart said, referring to the January press release.
Kaley disagreed.
"Everyone was trying to work together to understand this emerging issue," he said.
Stewart also asked Kaley if Monsanto made an attempt to remove PCBs from Snow Creek after the contamination was discovered.
"I'm not aware we did it," Kaley responded, noting that the company did work to control its PCB discharges to the creek and submitted that information to Alabama regulators.
Stewart asked Kaley if Monsanto did regular medical monitoring at its Anniston plant, but Monsanto attorneys objected to the question.
The attorneys for the plaintiffs and Monsanto conferred with Judge Joel Laird for several minutes, and then Laird dismissed the jury for the day.
Laird later explained that he wanted to have a "heart-to-heart" discussion with the attorneys. He set Kaley's testimony to resume at 9:15 a.m. today.
Earlier Thursday, the jury heard testimony from the plaintiffs' accounting expert, Wray Pierce, who said the owners of a local meat store, who are plaintiffs in the case, have lost significant business due to nearby PCB contamination.
Anniston Quality Meats, a retail and wholesale vendor two blocks north of the Monsanto plant, is asking for compensation for past, present and future damages of between $374,000 and $428,000, based on the expert's calculations.
Pierce said the meat store began to lose a significant amount of business after Solutia began buying PCB-contaminated businesses and homes in the vicinity. Overall, retail sales increased in Calhoun County between 1996 and 1999, and the vendor's second location in Saks also did fairly well, he said.
"The only difference I can identify is the neighborhood," Pierce said. "The business district is gone."
