GADSDENA retired Monsanto chemist testifying for the company Monday described a corporate culture that valued safety and tried to prevent PCBs from escaping into the environment.
“We’ve always prided ourselves on the safety and housekeeping of the facility,” said Jerry Brown, a Heflin resident who worked for 32 years at Monsanto’s Anniston plant.
Brown’s testimony opened the company’s defense of a lawsuit brought by more than 3,500 Anniston residents alleging a host of damages due to the company’s release of PCBs, a probable carcinogen. The 16 plaintiffs in the current phase of the trial claim that contamination with the banned compound has caused mental anguish and property damage.
Brown, who stills works as a consultant for Monsanto but said he wasn’t paid for his court appearance, offered a portrait that differed sharply from the one painted by the plaintiffs’ attorney during their nearly month-long presentation of evidence.
Attempting to dispel the image of a plant that allowed PCBs to flow freely into drainage ditches and creeks, Brown said that workers were encouraged to catch spills and leaks in buckets and that the captured liquids were recycled. Moreover, he defended two landfills that have come under fire from the plaintiffs for allowing the PCBs to migrate.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys countered the testimony by leading Brown through a succession of documents — some coming from within the company — they said cast doubt on the notion that Monsanto did everything it could to detect and prevent PCB pollution. Many of the documents were previously unknown to Brown, were written before his tenure at Monsanto, which began in 1967, or came from higher levels within the corporation.
Attorney Charles Cunningham used a list of old safety regulations from the Monsanto Research Corp. to question previous testimony in which Brown said he wasn’t concerned when he came into contact with PCBs. The regulations advised washing after contact.
“Washing is a normal hygiene practice for everything you do,” Brown said.
“I did not use the same sense of urgency for washing after (PCB contact) as I did with parathion,” he added, referring to a pesticide the plant produced.
Brown was on the witness stand for more than four hours, the majority of which was comprised by a cross-examination that moved briskly through a long line of documents.
Prior to Brown’s testimony, the lawyers wrangled over whether another defense witness should be allowed to testify to the benefits of PCBs in industrial use and to his not having suffered any ill effects despite years of working with the compound.
Circuit Judge Joel Laird said that if a future defense witness speaks to health effects then he’d allow the plaintiffs to call to the stand western Anniston residents with health problems they say are results of PCB exposure.
“If you want to open that can of worms,” he said, “I’m gonna give you the can and the can opener.”
