At least since 1969, management of defendant Honeywell knew that metallic mercury dumped into the Turtle River estuary would methylize, bioaccumulate in the fish and poison people who ate the fish.
That’s what attorneys for the city of Brunswick allege in a lawsuit filed last month against Honeywell, owner of the former LCP Chemicals plant site, and Georgia Power.
The city alleges mercury and Aroclor-1268 polychlorinated biphenyls, referred to in the lawsuit as PCBs, another chemical used at the plant, will continue to spread through the food chain due to Honeywell’s actions.
The city is seeking punitive damages for the loss of revenue from the use and rental fees of city waterfront properties resulting from the environmental contamination, the actual value to be determined by a jury.
“The actions of defendants have interfered with the value, use and enjoyment of property of the City of Brunswick. The properties of the City of Brunswick have been poisoned and contaminated,” the lawsuit alleges.
The lawsuit claims the company was aware chemicals dumped into local waterways posed a threat to anyone eating seafood from Glynn County and that it sold the former plant site when the cost of environmental cleanup was determined to be “uneconomical.”
Allied Chemical and Dye Corp., now Honeywell, opened the plant in 1955. By the time Honeywell filed a report with the U.S. Environmental Protection Division in 1981, the plant had dumped hundreds of tons of PCBs, a chemical used at the plant, and mercury into Purvis Creek — which flows into the Turtle River — and had created dump sites in the marsh for more of the same chemicals. Parts of the plant had begun sinking due to another chemical dissolving the soil underneath the structure.
The report, the lawsuit states, did not include this information. It only stated that the plant was responsible for the release of “4,500 tons of material containing trace amounts of mercury,” thereby concealing the true amount of mercury dumped and failing to mention PCBs.
As early as 1988, Honeywell and LPC Chemicals and Plastic Corp. were conspiring to hide the extent of the environmental pollution, the lawsuit claims, and it wasn’t until 1991 that the state Department of Natural Resources discovered fish contaminated with chemicals allegedly dumped at the site.
Even after the discovery, the lawsuit claims Honeywell — which used its position as creditor after financing LCP’s purchase of the plant to keep it in operation — tried to keep the plant open to defer environmental cleanup costs and save the company $20 million. By 1993, Honeywell had once again taken over direct operation of the plant to keep it running and continue deferring environmental cleanup orders, the lawsuit states.
Honeywell continued pumping money into the plant to keep it open to defer environmental cleanup orders, the lawsuit alleges, and fought state Environmental Protection Division efforts to shut it down until 1994. It continued dumping chemicals into local waterways and dumpsites throughout, the city claims.
Studies by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control found PCBs present in all manner of marine life in local waterways — including the highest concentration ever found in dolphins as of 2016 — and in humans 25 miles away on Sapelo Island.
The saga started decades earlier when the plant opened in 1955. According to the lawsuit, the leadership of Honeywell knew as early as 1969 of the danger to citizens caused by dumping mercury and PCBs into the environment, the lawsuit alleged.
“Despite the notice and knowledge of the toxic consequences of dumping metallic mercury into the Turtle River saltwater estuary, defendant Honeywell intentionally continued to dump more metallic mercury into the Turtle River Estuary and made no effort to recover the mercury that it had already wrongfully dumped and released,” the lawsuit says.
The city claims the company knew as early as 1970 that PCBs accumulate in animal fat and cause death among marine species but continued dumping tens of thousands of pounds of the chemical into local waterways.
By 1971, the city’s lawsuit claims the company was aware that mercury and PCBs were present in the local environment and posed a threat to anyone eating seafood from the immediate area.
“Defendant Honeywell elected to hide its wrongdoing and to take no action to notify and warn its neighbors, the city of Brunswick, or the citizens of the city of Brunswick or those who fished and crabbed in the waters of Glynn County or those who ate seafood from the waters of Glynn County,” the lawsuit alleges.
Managers at each of Honeywell’s industrial plants were directed in 1978 to determine the cost of complying with the environmental regulations, the lawsuit states, and the company decided to divest any holdings where the cost was found to be “uneconomical.”
The Brunswick site was one such holding, and in 1979 it was purchased by LCP Chemicals and Plastics Corp., the lawsuit alleges. It also claims Honeywell did not disclose the details of environmental contamination to LCP at the time.
Honeywell financed the purchase and was the creditor for LCP, the lawsuit claims, using that leverage to keep the plant in operation and continuing the dumping operation while removing itself from the EPA’s scrutiny. It eventually reacquired the plant to keep it running and defer state and federal environmental cleanup orders
In 1988, LCP and Honeywell “formed a conspiracy … to hide environmental misdeeds and to facilitate the continued operation of the plant for the purpose and with the effect of continuing and aggravating the nuisance that defendant Honeywell had created.”
According to the lawsuit, that conspiracy served to “assist defendant Honeywell’s effort to illegally hide its responsibility for the PCBs dumped at the site by requesting that insolvent LCP claim responsibility for the PCBs, with defendant Honeywell secretly reimbursing LCP for costs, even though LCP had never used PCB’s at the Brunswick plant.
In effect, the two companies wanted to deceive government agencies to hide “illegal, criminal conduct … and to avoid full financial responsibility for (Honeywell’s) misdeeds.”
The federal EPA is in the process of finalizing an environmental remediation plan for the former LCP plant site.
The city claims Georgia Power contributed to local environmental contamination at Plant McManus, a coal power plant that once operated in Brunswick. Emissions from the coal burning process included mercury vapor, the lawsuit alleges.
Neither Honeywell nor Georgia Power had filed a response as of Wednesday.
