A federal judge nixed a fishing expedition for a big tranche of data sought by people who live near the Department of Energy’s Portsmouth Site and who are trying to organize a class action lawsuit against eight current and former DOE contractors at the rural Ohio site.
In a mid-September court filing,U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth Preston Deavers said the contractors have already produced lots of information for the plaintiffs, including annual environmental reports, sampling for radioactive and non-radioactive contaminants within 13 miles of the federal property, access to an interactive website containing thousands of off-site sampling results, a description of pollution controls and related operating procedures at Portsmouth as well as the names of people in charge of testing and environmental compliance at the site.
But the plaintiffs — local Ursula McGlone, her family, the Dunham family of south-central Ohio and others — seek more disclosure. Among other things, they want the Portsmouth contractors to “[p]rovide all documents in your possession either received from or sent to any local, state, or federal regulatory agency or members of the press concerning Activities at the Plant, or Hazardous Substances at the Portsmouth Site.”
The next discovery hearing in the lawsuit, for which McGlone and her fellow plaintiffs seek class-action status, was scheduled for Oct. 13, according to the docket in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Eastern Division.
The defendants also seek health physicists’ records concerning any of the Portsmouth Site’s operations “or anyone’s safety or wellbeing in connection with the Portsmouth Site’s operations.”
Court records show an additional discovery status hearing is set next week.
In an amended complaint filed in March 2021, McGlone sought to represent a class of people including property owners within a five-mile radius of the DOE site, within 500 yards of the Scioto River, residents who lived at least one year near within five miles of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant as well as former students who attended the Zahn’s Corner Middle School, which closed in May 2019 following discovery of enriched uranium and neptunium-237 on the school grounds.
One of the Dunham children was a Zahn’s Corner student, according to the amended complaint.
An earlier ruling in the case in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio held “class discovery” should focus on the number of people allegedly harmed by improper emissions of hazardous substances from the former gaseous diffusion site and if the claims asserted by the affected individuals were similar.
The court in July 2020 dismissed plaintiff’s claims for a violation of the Price-Anderson Act and a violation of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act. Since then, current plaintiffs in the McGlone case have scaled back document discovery requests to include only information on “non-radioactive contaminants.”
