February 7, 2010

Middletown, Connecticut (CNN) — Five people were killed and at least 12 were injured in a gas explosion Sunday at an under-construction power plant in central Connecticut, local officials said.

Residents up to 20 miles away reported hearing the blast at about 11:19 a.m. at the Kleen Power Plant in Middletown, a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut.

“There is no present or continuing threat to anybody from either substances getting into the atmosphere or of a possible subsequent explosion,” Middletown Mayor Sebastian Giuliano said, adding terrorism has been ruled out.

He said plant workers were purging a natural gas pipeline when the explosion occurred.

“Urban search-and-rescue teams are on the premises … with dogs, attempting to locate and account for further victims,” Giuliano said.

It’s unknown how many people were working in the plant, which was about 95 percent complete, at the time of the explosion. Multiple contractors were involved in the project, Giuliano said, complicating efforts to account for those who may have been on the site.

“[Each contractor] has their own foreperson, their own employee list, so we’re trying to sort that out,” Giuliano said.

Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano said later Sunday that no one has come forward with any names of missing people and dogs have not detected signs of life beneath the rubble left by the explosion.

The plant was expected to go online this summer, Giuliano said.

Santostefano initially said about 50 people, most of them construction workers, were working at the time, but Giuliano said “we don’t know that as a hard number right now.”

“What I’ve been told by the owners of the project is that there could be anywhere from 100 to 200 people working on the site on any given day,” Giuliano said.

But Santostefano later said the numbers Giuliano cited were weekday figures, and he repeated his estimate of 50 to 60 people at the site Sunday when the explosion occurred. He said he thought most of those escaped the blast.

A no-fly zone was established over the site because of the unstable structure, Gov. Jodi Rell announced Sunday night.

Middlesex Hospital in Middletown said it received 11 patients from the explosion. One patient with serious injuries was flown to a hospital in Hartford, and another was transferred to Yale New Haven Hospital, according to a statement on Middlesex’s Web site. Two others had minor injuries and were treated and released. The remaining seven patients sustained injuries “mainly to the extremities, including broken bones, blunt trauma and abdominal pains,” the statement said.

Emergency room physician Dr. Jonathan Bankoff told reporters that some patients reported being thrown 30 or 40 feet by the blast.

Two people were airlifted directly to the Hartford hospital from the scene, Middlesex spokesman R. Brian Albert said. A center was being set up at Middletown’s City Hall for relatives of plant workers, he said.

As of late Sunday afternoon, the hospital said it was not expecting more patients from the plant.

After the explosion, it took a while for emergency crews to get into the plant, Santostefano said, because the plant was on fire and the natural gas had to be turned off at the source. No major incidents at the site had been reported since construction began there a couple of years ago, he said.

People miles away reported hearing or feeling the blast.

“It felt like the house was shaking,” Peter Moore, who lives about 10 miles away in Durham, told CNN. He said he thought at first there had been a traffic accident on his street or there was a problem with his house.

Moore said his mother, who lives in Woodbridge, about 20 miles away from the plant, also said she heard the explosion, and said it “sounded like someone pounded on the back door a couple of times.”

“It was almost like an earthquake,” nearby resident Lynn Townsend told CNN affiliate WTNH. She said she heard the explosion and went outside to see “a very big, bright orange flame” between the plant’s two smokestacks, and immediately dialed 911.

“It really shook the house,” she said. “Everybody was scared. The kids started to cry.

Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance told WTNH his agency has received “an immense amount of inquiries” from residents who heard or felt the explosion.

If you or anyone you know was injured or killed in the power plant gas explosion, please feel free to contact the Hayes Firm online or call 1-800-603-6833.  We will work to find the best attorney in your area to advise you and fight for your rights. 

By The Associated Press

Posted November 23, 2009

A Philadelphia jury has ordered Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to pay a woman $75 million in punitive damages after finding a link between her breast cancer and a hormone-replacement drug.

 The punitive damages in the case of Connie Barton were unsealed yesterday, the same day of a verdict in the case of Donna Kendall, who was awarded $6.3 million in compensatory damages and $28 million in punitive damages, said Esther Berezofsky, an attorney for Barton.

Last month, the jury awarded Barton $3.75 million in compensatory damages and found Wyeth willfully hid evidence of a cancer link.

 The punitive award for Barton, of Peoria, Ill., had been sealed until yesterday because Kendall’s case was being heard in the same courthouse. A handful of Prempro lawsuits have gone to trial out of several thousand filed across the country.

Wyeth, based in Madison, was acquired by New York drugmaker Pfizer Inc. for $68 billion last month. A spokesman for Pfizer said the company will challenge both verdicts.

“We are disappointed with the verdicts in these cases,” Pfizer spokesman Chris Loder said in a statement.

“The company believes that neither the awards of punitive damages nor the liability verdicts were supported by the evidence or the law.”

Barton, 64, a retired hospital records clerk from Peoria, took Prempro for five years before her 2002 cancer diagnosis.

Wyeth, in court arguments, told jurors that women are now fully informed of the risks and benefits of Prempro, a combination estrogen-progestin pill.

Kendall, 66, of Decatur, Ill., took combination estrogen-progestin therapy from 1991 to 2002, including the last four years on Prempro, and was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, said her attorney, Tobi Millrood.

In her case, Wyeth was ordered to pay $16 million of the punitive damages and Upjohn Co., which is now a division of Pfizer, was ordered to pay $12 million, Millrood said.

“Today’s verdict is a resounding victory not only for Donna Kendall but for women around the country,” Millrood said.

Sales of Prempro have plummeted since 2002 when a large federal health study, the Women’s Health Initiative, was stopped when researchers saw more breast cancers in those on Prempro.

A study this year shows that lung cancer seems more likely to prove fatal in women who are taking the combination drug.

By Duff Wilson, NY Times

Published: November 20, 2009

Legal experts predict that thousands of tobacco lawsuits could gain momentum in Florida after a Fort Lauderdale jury ordered Philip Morris USA to pay $300 million to a former smoker who says she needs a lung transplant.

 If it survives an appeal, the verdict late Thursday would be the nation’s largest award of damages to an individual suing a tobacco company and could encourage thousands of plaintiffs who have filed similar cases in Florida, according to Clifford E. Douglas of the University of Michigan Tobacco Research Network.

A state supreme court ruling in Florida a few years ago made it easier to pursue tobacco lawsuits there than in other states. But the tobacco industry, which plans to appeal, appeared unfazed. Tobacco companies have considered product liability suits as little more than a cost of doing business since the seven biggest companies agreed to pay $206 billion in a master settlement agreement with 46 states in 1998.

Florida, despite being one of those states, had a major legal ruling in 2006 that lowered a plaintiff’s burden of proof against a tobacco company.

The Florida Supreme Court rejected a class-action verdict and a $145 billion award to plaintiffs, saying smokers would have to sue individually. But the court said plaintiffs would not have to prove some key elements that had been upheld in the first stage of the class action: that nicotine is addictive, that smoking causes diseases, and that cigarette companies fraudulently hid those facts.

“That makes these cases in Florida unique,” Mr. Douglas said. Smokers in other states are still suing cigarette makers, he said, but they have higher legal hurdles.

A spokesman for the Altria Group, the Virginia-based parent company of Philip Morris USA, indicated it would appeal the verdict and said the Florida rules were “fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional.”

Shares of Altria, which had been up more than 27 percent this year, dropped 1.2 percent Friday, to $18.98.

Lucinda Naugle, the 61-year-old sister of a former Fort Lauderdale mayor, was awarded $56 million in compensatory damages and $244 million in punitive damages Thursday after a three-week trial and three hours of jury deliberation in Broward County Circuit Court.

Ms. Naugle, an office manager, had started smoking when she was 20 and quit when she was 45 years old, her lawyer, Robert W. Kelley of Fort Lauderdale, said in a telephone interview Friday. She now has severe emphysema and needs a lung transplant she cannot afford, he said.

The jury assigned her 10 percent of the liability for her smoking and disease, and Philip Morris 90 percent.

“She’ll get paid, I would hope, within a year or two,” Mr. Kelley said. “The question is will she live long enough.”

Mr. Kelley said about 25 more cases were lined up for trial in Florida next year. In all, more than 9,000 people from the former class action filed individual suits in various courts in Florida against tobacco makers by January 2008, the deadline set by the state Supreme Court.

About 4,000 of those cases were filed in federal court and have been stayed, pending a review scheduled in January by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta.

Brendan J. McCormick, a spokesman for Altria, said Friday that the company expected the federal appellate court to reject the standards of proof set by the state Supreme Court. “What you have is a defined number of cases in Florida with unique issues that will ultimately be resolved on appeal,” he said.

David J. Adelman, a tobacco analyst for Morgan Stanley, said the Florida case and, separately, forthcoming class-action lawsuits over light cigarette claims pose an “undeniable” increase in the industry’s legal risk “which had previously declined to an unprecedented low point.”

In an interview, Mr. Adelman noted that there were no jury trials in cigarette cases all of last year, and that other states had decertified class-action suits in ways more favorable to the tobacco industry. Further, Mr. Adelman said, the major legal threats to the industry were removed by the 1998 settlement with states. And since then, the industry has fended off calls in court and Congress for a huge disgorgement of its profits.

Even in light of the Florida verdict, Mr. Adelman said the tobacco industry could afford several hundred million dollars a year in legal losses if it had to. “That is a financially manageable issue,” he said.

Of more concern, he said in the interview and a note to investors, is a coming round of cases claiming fraud and damages from past marketing of so-called light cigarettes.

Those products have been shown to be no less harmful than regular cigarettes because smokers inhale them more deeply. Congress, in landmark tobacco legislation earlier this year, prohibited the use of the terms “light,” “low” or “mild” in all cigarette labeling and marketing, effective June 22, 2010.

The first of the “light cigarette” class-action cases is scheduled in Minnesota next October, followed by Missouri in January 2011.

Posted November 13, 2009

By Jessie-Lynne Kerr, jacksonville.com

A Circuit Court jury in Flagler County Thursday returned a $5.1 million verdict in a wrongful death case stemming from a 2006 fatal collision between a fully loaded tractor-trailer and a Honda minivan.

Ingrid Falkenstein, 67, who had just retired to Palm Coast with her husband, David Falkenstein, was killed instantly in the wreck. Her husband suffered a pelvic fracture among other injuries.

Falkenstein’s attorney, Steve Pajcic of Jacksonville, presented evidence that showed trucker Christopher Angland of Palatka, driving for McMaster Sod LLC of Bunnell, ran a stop sign at Cody’s Corner. The accident occurred about 6:30 p.m. May 18 at the well-known but isolated intersection in the southwest part of the county.

The defendants argued that the county was at fault because of poor signage at the intersection and a failure to replace worn rumble strips approaching the stop sign.

But the jury placed 60 percent of the blame on the driver, 40 percent on McMaster and none on the county. Pajcic said some of his most compelling evidence was a Valentine’s card that Falkenstein gave his wife in the first year of their 33-year marriage that pledged, “Our happiness is our wealth.”

Pajcic urged the jury to place the same value on their long marriage as the couple had themselves. He argued that reckless driving by a tired trucker had robbed the couple of their golden years of retirement.

For two decades, Lively Neely went to work at the DuPont plant in Old Hickory. And for two decades, he brought home deadly asbestos dust to his wife, Ruby.

Now their son, Roger Neely, has filed a lawsuit against the company and 20 others that subcontracted at the plant over the years, alleging that the company’s failure to warn its employees of the danger of wearing work clothes out of the plant is responsible for the death of Ruby Neely.

“DuPont failed to provide any type of warnings or instructions about the safe use of asbestos,” said H. Douglas Nichol, the family’s attorney.

 ”With regard to Mrs. Neely, they were allowing workers to go home with asbestos on their clothing, and didn’t provide change of clothing or showers to prevent that from happening.”

 Ruby Neely died this year of mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure that typically takes many years to manifest.

 According to the lawsuit, information about the dangers of asbestos had been available to the company as early as the 1930s, but they still weren’t informing insulators on the line of the hazards until the 1970s, when many workers had already died of asbestos-related illnesses.

 Dan Turner with DuPont public affairs said the company had not seen the lawsuit and couldn’t comment on the specifics.

 ”All DuPont sites adhere to strict applicable federal and state health and safety standards regarding asbestos,” Turner said. “The safety and health of our employees, our neighbors and our community has, and continues to be, DuPont’s highest priority.”

According to the suit, Lively Neely would cut, mold and fit asbestos containing insulation and cement onto the various lines at DuPont. He also died of asbestos-related disease, Nichol said, and had settled a lawsuit with the company in the 1980s.

 The Tennessee Supreme Court decided on a similar case last year in which Amanda Satterfield sued Alcoa claiming she was terminally ill from the asbestos dust her father carried home from work. Though the case was initially dismissed, Tennessee’s highest court disagreed and sent the case back for trial.

 That case was settled for a confidential amount, said Nichol.

Posted November 4, 2009

By Christine McConville

A week after suppliers of tainted ground beef recalled tons of their products, the families of two New England children who fell ill after eating the beef are suing the companies.

Yesterday in Plymouth District Court, lawsuits were filed against Brockton-based South Shore Meats and Fairbank Farms Inc. of Ashville, N.Y.

In one complaint, the parents of Andrea Munro of Marshfield, say their 12-year-old daughter was infected with the potentially deadly Escherichia coli bacteria after eating Fairbank Farms’ beef on Sept. 24. The family lawyer has said the beef was purchased from Star Market in Marshfield.

In the second case, the mother of Austin Richmond, 11, of Lincoln, R.I., says her son was infected last month with E. coli after eating a hamburger on a school outing at Camp Bournedale in Plymouth. The boy’s burger was reportedly made with meat from South Shore Meats, a unit of Crocetti’s Oakdale Packing Co.

Fairbank Farms has recalled more than half a million pounds of fresh ground beef products, while Crocetti’s has recalled 1,039 pounds of ground beef. The companies did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The plaintiffs in yesterday’s lawsuits are represented by Marler Clark, a Seattle law firm, and Somerset lawyer Steven Sabra. The suits seek unspecified damages.

Two deaths and 28 illnesses in the Northeast have been linked to the Fairbank Farms beef recall, according to federal health officials.

Posted November 3, 2009

By Ben Neary, Associated Press Writer

Published October 31, 2009

By newsinferno.com

The distributor of recalled Simplicity bassinets has been named a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Illinois Attorney General.  The lawsuit alleges that SFCA Inc, which acquired Simplicity Inc. last year, ignored a nationwide recall of Simplicity bassinets that had suffocated two infants.

In August, dozens of retailers recalled the defective Simplicity bassinets.  The massive recall affected nearly 900,000 bassinets and was prompted by the death of a six-month-old girl from Shawnee, Kansas who was strangled on August 21 when she became trapped between the bassinet’s metal bars.  In 2007, a four-month-old baby girl from Noel, Missouri, became trapped in the bassinet’s metal bars and died. It was determined that metal bars on the  Simplicity bassinets were spaced farther apart than federal standards allow.

When the Missouri baby died last fall, Simplicity was already in dire financial straits, owing to another massive crib recall it had issued earlier in the summer.  With creditors circling, Simplicity sold its assets at auction two months later to SCFA, an affiliate of Blackstreet Capital, a Bethesda, Maryland private-equity fund with $88 million dollars under management.  Under the deal, SFCA bought the right to sell products under the Simplicity brand but did not take legal responsibility for products made under its previous owners.  Because of that legal loophole, the  Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) had to ask retailers to recall the Simplicity bassinets.

In announcing her lawsuit, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan criticized both SFCA and the CPSC for the way the Simplicity bassinet recall was handled.  “Our investigation revealed that SFCA continued to distribute recalled products that posed serious risks to children,” Madigan said in a statement. “I will not allow this company to wash its hands of responsibility to Illinois families.”

Madigan wants SFCA to implement a recall that  it would publicize in newspapers across Illinois.  The lawsuits also seeks a refund for retailers who were forced to take on the costs of the Simplicity bassinet recall.

Madigan also said the CPSC should take tougher action when crib or bassinet recalls are necessary.  She criticized the commission’s policy of allowing crib manufacturers to respond to recalls by issuing repair kits. She also said the commission’s recall notices are unnecessarily complicated and confusing for consumers

Posted October 29, 2009

By Dave Altimari, The Hartford Courant

Atwilda Brown died trying to pour herself a cup of hot chocolate.

As the 80-year-old woman reached across the electric stove to grab a teapot full of hot water in her East Windsor kitchen on a Saturday night in February 2005, the sleeve of her chenille robe brushed against the burner and caught fire.

She ran to her bedroom furiously trying to put out the flames engulfing her robe as her disabled husband looked on. But by the time she threw the robe to the floor it was too late. More than 35 percent of her arms and back were burned and she died a few weeks later after being transferred to the Bridgeport Burn Center.

Brown is one of at least nine people across the country to die of burns suffered when their robes, sold by the Blair Corp. of Warren, Pa., caught fire, according to federal officials.

Brown’s daughter filed a wrongful death lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Hartford this week, blaming the company for making robes made of flammable material from Pakistan without doing the proper testing, and designing a garment that turned into a fire trap when ignited.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission, which already has recalled Blair’s chenille full-length robes like the one Brown was wearing, expanded the recall late last week to include any chenille tops and jackets made by the same Pakistani manufacturer and sold by Blair. In all, more than 300,000 garments have now been recalled.

“This robe is highly flammable, flames travel quickly up the robe,” CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson said last week. “It is a deadly risk to women.”

Blair Corp. refused comment on the lawsuit.

Atwilda Brown’s robe, with a matching pair of slippers, arrived in late January 2005 and was the latest in a long line of garments she had purchased from Blair, a company known to market clothing to older women.

She stayed home the night of the fire to care for her husband rather than go to their daughter Sharon’s 60th birthday party in Beacon Falls.  

“For years I carried around this guilt because we didn’t have the party closer to where my mother lived,” Sharon Davis said in an interview Wednesday.

The fire puzzled the family from the beginning.

“We never could figure out what happened,” Davis said. “It was an electric stove and my mother was a vibrant woman who could take care of herself.”

It wasn’t until four years later that Davis got a clue to what happened — courtesy of the Blair Corp. The company sent a recall letter, dated in April of this year, to Atwilda Brown, warning her that the robe she bought in January 2005 was highly flammable.

“I was so angry to learn what had really happened and to discover that it really shouldn’t have happened,” Davis said. “You trust when you buy a piece of clothing from someplace that it is safe. Unfortunately, my mother ordered the wrong item from Blair’s and she died because of it.”

There have been two other Blair recalls of chenille products since that one in April. Glastonbury attorney Bruce Raymond of Raymond and Bennett, who is representing Davis, said that number of recalls strung together so quickly, particularly for clothing, is highly unusual.

Raymond said that not only is the material highly flammable, which he said the company already knew, but also the design of the robe was faulty.

“They picked one of the most flammable materials, there was lax quality control on all these garments being tested as required, they had wide cuffs which easily could catch on fire and there were seven buttons down the front that needed to be unbuttoned before a person could take it off over their heads,” Raymond said.

The lawsuit seeks $30 million. A representative of a New York public relations firm hired by Blair Corp. to represent it during the recall said Wednesday that the company would not comment on the Connecticut lawsuit.

Following the latest recall announcement, Blair CEO Shelley Nandkeolyar issued a statement: “We strongly encourage anyone still in possession of a recalled robe to call our consumer hot line at (877) 392-7095 and return it immediately. In addition to our outreach to get these robes out of the hands of consumers, we are redoubling our efforts to ensure the products we sell are safe.”

Davis said she hopes the lawsuit also will warn others.

“No amount of money can ever bring back the loved ones that people have lost but it is the only recourse we have,” Davis said. “Our absolute goal is awareness. We don’t know how many people may not be aware that these clothes are dangerous and that there is a real problem here.”

Posted October 28, 2009

By Mark Millican, the Daily Citizen

An alleged “history” of gas leaks and problems associated with galvanized piping at the Dalton Housing Authority complex on Underwood Street may form the basis of a wrongful death lawsuit following two deaths in an explosion and fire there, an attorney said Tuesday.

Jeffery Chad Nations, 34, of apartment 410, Underwood Court, died two days after the Aug. 22 explosion that rocked the residential neighborhood in east Dalton. His mother, Martha Sue Nations, 56, of the same address, died on Sept. 27. Both were in the Joseph M. Still Burn Center in Augusta when they died.

Since the explosion, several investigators have scoured the scene, including from the DHA’s insurance company, local and state fire agencies, and an examiner hired by Nations family attorney Genevieve Frazier.

Frazier said she has interviewed neighbors of the family at Underwood Court and two former employees in the city maintenance department and found there is a history of complaints about gas leaks and “problems” with the piping.

“Witnesses say the fire department came in and said there were problems with the galvanized piping, problems with rusting,” she said. “The rusting also affects the smell of the gas, and can pull in chemicals (with the gas). My understanding is that the fire department recommended the piping be replaced and it was not.”

Dalton Fire Chief Bruce Satterfield said he is “familiar” with some of the statements coming from Frazier and witnesses she’s interviewed since he has received two Open Records Act requests for information.

“I’ve looked back and found one instance — it was sometime between 2004 and 2006, I can’t remember exactly because I don’t have the records right in front of me — where there was a gas leak (at the housing complex), but it was not in that same (apartment) facility,” he said. “We shut the gas off at the facility, contacted Dalton Utilities, which locks the gas out, and turned it over to the housing authority maintenance crew for repair. Dalton Utilities must see that (the piping) is fixed before they’ll turn the gas back on.”

Satterfield disputed the statement that the fire department had recommended that gas pipes be replaced.

“We have found no evidence or knowledge where this department — through our records management system, nor through our two code enforcement officers — ever told the housing authority that pipes needed to be replaced in the entire facility,” he said.

Satterfield said he believed Frazier was “testing the waters” with the records requests to get at the veracity of the witness statements.

“We have shut other apartments down before due to gas or electric problems,” he added. “It’s all documented, and we always check to see they’re back up to code before the gas or electricity is turned back on.”

The department is still waiting on “expert documentation” as to the cause of the explosion from James Dido, a mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer Joe Nemeth, he said.

Satterfield asked the members of the Public Safety Commission on Tuesday whether legal fees would be paid by the city or come out of his fire department budget. City attorney Jim Bisson said an “ad litem notice” — which state law requires before a government entity can be sued — has been filed, and that the city had responded.

“I have no idea what the fees are at this point, or who will bear the charges,” he said. “We do have an insurance carrier and they have been notified.”

Satterfield said the legal fees were around $500, stemming largely from the records requests, and that the invoice had been mistakenly sent to his department.

“They sent me the bill, but the city is named in the (ad litem filing of the) lawsuit,” he said.

City finance director Cindy Jackson said the legal bill would likely go through the administrative budget.