Washington state will remain a plaintiff in a lawsuit it brought against the Department of Energy and its Hanford Site waste storage tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), demanding better protection from chemical vapors for Hanford workers.
On Thursday, Judge Thomas Rice ruled in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington against a motion by DOE and WRPS to dismiss the state from the case. DOE and WRPS claimed the state lacked legal standing to file suit, but did not challenge the standing of watchdog organization Hanford Challenge and Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598, which are plaintiffs in a nearly identical lawsuit being heard jointly with the state case.
Rice heard arguments on the DOE and WRPS motion Oct. 12 in the Spokane federal courthouse, along with separate arguments on the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction to require increased worker protections until the lawsuit is decided.
The case is scheduled for a bench trial Sept. 18, 2017.
Rice has ruled only on the defendants’ motion to dismiss and has not yet ruled on the plaintiffs’ request for the preliminary injunction. That decision is anticipated in a matter of weeks, said Mark Lindholm, WRPS president, in a message to employees after the initial ruling Thursday.
“WRPS’ commitment to protecting our workforce remains unchanged, as the legal matters work themselves out,” Lindholm stated.
Washington state and the other plaintiffs filed their lawsuits in September 2015, alleging that hazardous tank vapors pose a serious risk to workers at Hanford. In the preliminary injunction request they are seeking measures including mandatory use of supplied air respirators for any worker within the fence lines of Hanford’s tank farms, along with an expanded vapor control zone at least 200 feet beyond the fence lines of impacted tank areas during any waste-disturbing operations.
The DOE and WRPS motion to dismiss the state “was just another example of the federal government’s culture of indifference to worker safety at Hanford,” said Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson in a statement. “Rather than continuing to evade responsibility with procedural motions, the federal government and their contractor should focus on protecting Washington workers,” he said.
The federal government has a superior claim to represent the rights and welfare of its citizens, which the state is attempting to usurp in its vapor protection lawsuit, DOE argued in its motion. In his order, Rice said he found little merit to that argument. The language of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) authorizes the state to take legal action, the judge found. He also was not convinced by DOE arguments that the state could not sue to vindicate the interest of a narrow subset of its population, in this case tank farm workers.
Safety interests go beyond the 2,000 current tank farm workers to include other Hanford personnel and future workers at the former plutonium production site, the judge said. He rejected what he called “DOE’s assertion that the alleged injury affects an insufficient … segment of the population.”
