The $553.9 million jury verdict in the Rocky Flats lawsuit ought to be a “body blow” to what some lawyers called the U.S. Department of Energy’s policy of denying responsibility for pollution and illness caused by its nuclear weapons facilities.
But lawyers who have taken on the DOE and its contractors in a variety of such cases doubted the verdict would persuade the government to ease its battles against homeowners and workers who contend they were injured.
“The DOE has a history of fighting these sorts of cases,” said Reuben Guttman, a New York lawyer who has represented workers at Manhattan Project nuclear weapons sites. “The DOE has never wanted to open the floodgates.”
Representatives of the DOE and lawyers who represent contractors said the verdict, which several called wrongheaded, would not constitute an overarching mandate in cases where the facts typically are very different.
“To say that it has wide-ranging implications would be pure, false speculation,” said Mell Roy, a DOE lawyer who had been chief counsel at Rocky Flats.
She said the government and its contractors would continue to look at cases on an individual basis and make decisions accordingly.
A jury Tuesday awarded actual and punitive damages to owners of 12,000 properties downwind of the now-defunct Rocky Flats nuclear trigger plant.
The award, the largest civil verdict in Colorado, probably will be reduced once Senior U.S. District Judge John Kane applies law and damage caps. One lawyer in the case calculated the resulting award would be $352 million.
Kevin Van Wart, a Chicago lawyer who has defended government defense contractors, didn’t think the verdict would survive the appeals process, which he said would take one to two years.
The Rocky Flats lawsuit was filed in 1990, in the wake of a much-publicized FBI raid of the Cold War-era plant during an investigation of environmental crimes. Much of the testimony during the trial focused on the plutonium released from the plant during two serious fires and through leaking waste barrels that were stored on the site.
The plant, near Golden, was part of a nationwide complex that produced nuclear weapons after World War II. During the past two to three decades, people who have worked in or around plants such as Rocky Flats have taken legal action seeking cleanup or compensation.
Richard Miller, senior policy analyst with Government Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group, said the government has a history of protecting its contractors.
The private companies typically are indemnified by the U.S. government, Miller said. That’s the case with Dow Chemical and Rockwell International, the contractors in Rocky Flats. That means the companies are not liable for verdicts or legal fees associated with the case.
Miller said the Rocky Flats verdict, breathtaking as it is in its sheer size, probably won’t mean a sweeping change in how the government and its contractors defend these cases.
A. Barry Cappello, a Santa Barbara, Calif., lawyer who is representing other workers suing a government defense contractor, said the verdict might encourage legal action by others who believe they were injured by similar facilities. He said the verdict ought to be a “body blow” to the DOE and what he said was the department’s steadfast denial of responsibility.
Cappello said perhaps the verdict would make clear to the DOE and its contractors that juries aren’t willing to buy “technical defenses” that don’t speak to the truth.
“Maybe they’ll understand how their games will play once they get in front of a jury,” Cappello said.
Staff writer Alicia Caldwell can be reached at 303-820-1930 or acaldwell@denverpost.com.
