On Friday, March 21, 2008, a Santa Cruz County Superior Court jury returned defense verdicts for Chevron in a four-plaintiff toxic brain damage toxic exposure case. The case was entitled Constance Acevedo, etc al. v. California Spray-Chem, Case Number CISCV146344. The jury concluded in each case that medical causation had not been established.
The case involved a former lead arsenate pesticide plant that operated near downtown Watsonville, California between 1907 and 1930. In 1996, large amounts of lead and arsenic were found on the former manufacturing site and three adjacent residential properties. The Court determined that Chevron had become the legal successor of the defunct business that had manufactured the pesticide (a point Chevron denied). The California EPA's Department of Toxic Substances Control became the lead responsible agency for the site, ordering Chevron to conduct an extensive investigation and massive soil remediation. This included purchasing residential properties and removing significant quantities of highly contaminated soil (e.g., up to 11,000 ppm lead), and the construction of a three acre, 11 inch-thick asphalt cap (which Chevron is obligated to maintain in perpetuity) over the most contaminated portion of the site. The Cal EPA determined the risk of removal of the volume of such contaminated material posed too great a risk to the community.
Superimposed on these facts, thereafter some 200+ plaintiffs, former and present residents of Watsonville, who had resided within a mile of the former site, brought suit for a wide variety of adverse health effects including birth defects, mental retardation, cancer and brain damage. Their common claim was that the lead and arsenic had contaminated wide areas of the community over the 20th century, poisoning scores of young pregnant mothers and their children (lead and arsenic readily are transported across the placenta to the fetus), and that earlier concentrations of the metals were far higher than as measured in 1996. Lead is a human neurotoxin; arsenic is an established human carcinogen.
The undercurrent of the trial was plaintiffs' theory that Chevron had long known of the contamination but had suppressed information about it both to avoid cost and because the population at risk is poor and minority. Chevron vehemently denied these allegations.
Particularly challenging for the defense was the Court's instruction to the jury that Chevron had been determined, as a matter of law, to be negligent for permitting lead and arsenic to migrate off the former manufacturing site and into the larger residential community. That is, Chevron was collaterally estopped on the issue of liability and the issues at trial were limited to medical causation.
These four plaintiffs including a 62 year old woman who is borderline mentally retarded (never has been able to read or write) whose mother resided very near the site while pregnant and who herself grew up near the site; and three other middle-aged plaintiffs with claimed significant brain injuries, two of who have chronic pain and are completely disabled. The trial took four weeks.
Chevron made a $3,000 statutory pre-trial settlement offer to each plaintiff. Plaintiffs, represented by attorneys Keith Robinson of Gonzales and Robinson in Westlake Village, and Steve Plas, located in Oakland, asked the jury for compensatory damages in excess of $10 million. During deliberations, plaintiffs made a settlement demand of $7.5 million; Chevron made no counter.
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