Staff Reports
WC Monitor
2/5/2016
A federal judge late last week closed the 1991 downwinder case filed against five early Hanford Site contractors, after declining to allow a final claim to be heard. Judge William Fremming Nielsen indicated in October that he was ready to close the case and ordered anyone who could show cause why the case should remain open to come forward.
The case, at its largest, had as many as 5,000 people who claimed that radioactive emissions from Hanford had harmed their health, according to the attorneys defending early Hanford contractors DuPont, General Electric, UNC Nuclear Industries, Atlantic Richfield, and Rockwell International. Plaintiffs put the total at closer to 3,550. Only six cases went to jury trial after Nielsen ordered each side to select a combined total of a dozen cases for a bellwether trial, in hopes that would give them guidance to reach settlements. Six of the dozen cases were either dropped or dismissed as too weak to go forward to trial in 2005. A jury found for the defendants in three of the cases that went to trial, and awarded a combined $550,000 to two defendants with thyroid cancer who received relatively large estimated doses of radioactive iodine. The jury split on the final defendant who had thyroid cancer and a smaller estimated dose, but on retrial the decision was for the defendants.
The last major group of plaintiffs settled for undisclosed amounts in fall 2015 and the case appeared ready to be closed until the estate of Frieda Seaman came forward. Attorney Michael Bloom said he had little involvement in the case over the last decade because his case, filed in 1988 in Oregon federal court, was largely ready to go to trial before it was consolidated in 1991 with other cases filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. Nielsen ruled late last week that the Seaman case be dismissed because of the public’s interest in wrapping up litigation, after considering but deciding against sanctioning Bloom.
“The case has been languishing for decades without resolution,” Nielsen said in the court order. “The cost alone is staggering. Over the last decade the court created trial tracks to speed along resolution, but Seaman did not take advantage of any opportunity to be added to a trial track or pursue litigation.” Bloom did not respond to a request for comment. Although early contractors were named in the lawsuit, the federal government indemnified them and is expected to pay the cost of settlement agreements.
