Bayer Ordered to Pay School Employees $165 Million in Latest PCB Lawsuit

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

A Washington state jury last week ordered chemical giant Bayer to pay $165 million to a group of Sky Valley Education Center employees who alleged they became seriously ill from polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that leaked from light fixtures made by the company, Reuters reported.

After nearly two months of trial and two weeks of deliberations, the jury on Nov. 20 found Monsanto spinoff Pharmacia LLC liable for selling PCBs without providing adequate warnings, which resulted in neurological injuries, endocrine disruption and cognitive impairment to the plaintiffs.

Sky Valley is an alternative public school in Monroe, Washington. Plaintiffs included a librarian, a custodian and five teachers. Two of the teachers developed rare cancers.

“Decades ago, Monsanto promised to be responsible for the products it put out into our world,” Colleen Durkin Peterson, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, said in a press release.

“They now refuse to keep that promise. We are thankful that a jury of our clients’ peers heard the evidence over nine weeks and chose to hold Monsanto accountable,” she added.

All plaintiffs were awarded damages in the verdict, which included $49.8 million in compensatory damages and $115.3 million in punitive damages.

Although Pharmacia LLC is named as the defendant in the case, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, will be responsible for the damages due to legal agreements between the companies governing liabilities from historic chemicals production, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs and financial reports.

This verdict is one of several successful lawsuits against the Big Chemical conglomerate by employees and students from Sky Valley.

An initial trial ended in June 2021, with a $185 million verdict in favor of three teachers, and a second trial later that year resulted in a $62 million verdict in favor of a group of seven students and parents.

Four plaintiffs also were awarded $21.37 million in June 2022, and in October 2022, 10 students and parents won a $275 million verdict. In July, two children who sustained chronic permanent damage from exposure to the PCBs at the school won a $72 million verdict against the company.

Approximately 200 plaintiffs at the school have filed suit against the company in more than 22 similar cases.

Monsanto faces nearly $870 million in verdicts already granted related to the PCB exposure at the Sky Valley Center. The company is appealing the verdicts.

PCBs are synthetic chemicals used as insulating chemicals and coolants that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) linked to birth defects, cancers and other illnesses. PCBs were commercially manufactured from 1929 until they were banned from production in 1979 because they pose “a significant hazard to human health and the environment.”

According to the company’s website, it stopped producing the toxic chemicals in 1977, two years before they were banned by the EPA. The company said the school had been warned repeatedly since the 1990s that its light fixtures needed to be retrofitted, but those warnings were ignored.

All Sky Valley plaintiffs ‘experienced significant, profound damages’

Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe School District is home to one of the largest public parental co-op education programs in Washington, offering over 700 K-12 students individual learning plans.

In 2011, the school moved from a warehouse space into the existing Sky Valley campus, The Seattle Times detailed in its 2022 investigation into the PCB poisoning at the school.

Monsanto originally produced the PCBs that were used in light fixtures and caulking in Sky Valley’s 1950s- and 60s-era buildings. The light fixtures in 2014 began smoking, catching fire and leaking oily, yellow PCB liquids into classrooms.

Parents, teachers and students who are plaintiffs in the various lawsuits reported a variety of illnesses including hormonal problems, skin conditions, cancers and brain damage resulting from PCB exposure.

A teacher connected the symptoms people were experiencing to PCBs. Inspections and environmental testing across the campus later found the PCBs along with other harmful environmental conditions on the campus.

Records show officials from the Monroe School District, where Sky Valley is located, were slow to respond to complaints and slow to remove the PCB-laden light fixtures from the campus. After the EPA stepped in to advise officials and encourage them to clean it up quickly, officials informed the agency that cleanup had been completed despite the fact that toxic material still remained on campus, The Seattle Times found.

One hundred and ninety-five plaintiffs also sued the Monroe School District, which negotiated a $34 million settlement separately from Monsanto, although it did not accept responsibility for the hazardous conditions and insisted it had been proactive in cleaning up the chemicals and informing parents, ProPublica reported.

The $34 million offer is the maximum allowed under the Monroe School District’s insurance policy.

The special master in that case, King County Superior Court Judge Richard McDermott, wrote in his ruling that plaintiffs experienced “significant, profound damages which they will have to live with for the remainder of their lives and for which they deserve to be compensated.”

And although McDermott is not the judge in the cases against Monsanto, he wrote that the chemical giant “is going to have to get serious about a global settlement that is large enough that the plaintiffs will have to pay attention,” The Seattle Times reported.

He also wrote that Monroe School District is “far less culpable than the product manufacturer.”

Although the manufacture of PCBs was banned in 1979, their use and sale was not. Internal Monsanto documents revealed in litigation show the company continued to sell them for years, while publicly downplaying the health risks.

After the ban, states allowed the purchase and use of the chemicals. Washington, for example, passed a law in 2014 requiring state agencies to purchase PCB-free products “whenever possible.”

The law does not require testing for PCBs in school buildings. Although health districts are required to inspect school campuses for environmental hazards, state law doesn’t require that recommendations be enforced, that certain hazards be removed or that testing results be disclosed to parents, students or teachers.

A nationwide problem

Experts say PCBs remain present in aging schools and other buildings across the country and a string of lawsuits have been filed to hold Monsanto, along with institutions that have continued to use PCBs, responsible.

In addition to posing many serious, known health risks to humans, PCBs are also known to be harmful to fish and wildlife. They don’t break down easily, making remediation difficult and expensive.

Research shows people can be exposed to PCBs through water, by breathing in contaminated air, by exposure to contaminated soil and by ingesting contaminated food.

Some states are taking action to address the problem. Last year Vermont launched a first-in-the-nation pilot program to identify and remove PCBs from schools.

Several thousand municipalities have sued over PCB contamination of waterways, and the attorneys general of several states have also sued over contamination of schools and other properties.

Bayer agreed as of August 2023 to pay $650 million to municipal entities for PCB water pollution, but several other claims are still pending.

In August, Reuters reported, Bayer set aside 694 million euros for an expected settlement with the State of Oregon over PCBs in wastewater.

Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller has been an even bigger litigation burden for Bayer. In the largest Roundup settlement so far, a Missouri jury last week ordered the corporation to pay more than $1.5 billion to three former users of the weedkiller who alleged their cancers resulted from using it.

After the recent verdicts, Bayer AG lost about $8.3 billion in market value, the largest drop in its history.