MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.
As the lead smelter’s gray smokestack towers above her, Brenda Browning walks toward a grassy hollow next to the low-slung Herculaneum City Hall building. A paved driveway leads to nowhere. Two white clothesline posts stand absently nearby.
This used to be her home.
Now, like the plaintiffs who achieved a stunning court victory against the corporations running the smelter, she lives someplace else, her lead-tainted home abandoned and eventually razed.
Browning’s three children, along with a handful of other plaintiffs, settled with the three corporate defendants two years ago for a confidential sum. She said she’s happy with the jury’s result for her former neighbors.
“The verdict was just, fair and appropriate,” Browning said. “The case focused on children, but it affected all people.”
Browning, who herself grew up in the area, said the neighborhood leading up to the fenced gates of the plant used to be packed with houses and teeming with children. On a blisteringly hot afternoon last week, each yard appears mowed and well-groomed, but the houses that remain seem empty and quiet. A harsh metallic smell lingers in the air.
The street that housed the homes of three of the plaintiffs is now a park. It’s flooded now, lukewarm water lapping at the top of a submerged park bench.
Browning first learned about the town’s high lead levels in the early 1990s when she hired a contractor to remodel her house. The contractor told her his workers would wear respirators during the job to protect against the lead in the air. Browning said she was shocked.
“We didn’t know it,” she said. “No one in the community knew.”
Browning said she was the first Herculaneum parent to walk into attorney Mark Bronson’s office and tell him about the residents’ exposure to a toxic cocktail of lead, cadmium, arsenic and sulfuric acid. That was in 1994, after she brought her three children, Emily, Andrew and Lauren, to a pediatrician to get their blood tested for lead.
When the doctor asked where she lived, she replied, “Herculaneum.”
“Move,” she said the doctor told her.
Browning now lives in Festus. In December 2009, her children confidentially settled with the three defendants hit July 29 by the $320 million punitive verdict.
“Do you take the risk of going to trial, or do you settle?” said Browning, a paralegal for 30 years, most recently with the Gould Law Firm in Hillsboro. “It was a long journey. I wasn’t going to face Ira Rennert [the the chief executive officer of the Renco Group, which runs the smelter]. None of the defendants themselves would have to appear and I would not be able to face them as I had always planned.”
“Brenda is certainly passionate and concerned,” said Bronson, her attorney. “Her concern arises out of her children … with good reason. Each of them was harmed as a result of exposure to lead. It was totally avoidable.”
As mentioned during the trial, the corporations could have bought out the Herculaneum residents for a relative bargain and spared from exposure the children born there in the early 1990s, like Browning’s, Bronson said.
Browning’s voice broke as she described her first visit to the site of her former home after her family moved out and the company bulldozed it. It was a mud pit then.
“When you’ve grown up in a place, there’s a grief associated with that,” she said. “They have no right to take that away from us.
“It cannot be fixed.”
Top plaintiff jury verdicts in St. Louis Circuit Court (FROM July 2006 – July 2011)
■ $358.5 million, Alexander v. Fluor Corp. (lead poisoning) July 29, 2011
■ $27 million, Martin v. Survivair Respirators Inc. (wrongful death, product liability) Sept. 19, 2007
■ $13 million, Anderson v. Bratco (wrongful death) July 27, 2006
■ $6.1 million, Blankenship v. SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital (wrongful death, medical malpractice) Aug. 17, 2009
■ $4.2 million, Perry v. Union Pacific Railroad Co. (negligence) Sept. 24, 2007
Other results of Missouri litigation involving environmental hazards
■ $177 million settlement, State of Missouri v. Union Electric Co. (environmental damage from Taum Sauk reservoir disaster) Reynolds County, Nov. 28, 2007
■ $17.9 million settlement, Sifford v. Ashland Inc. (consumer class action over Valvoline’s used oil disposal fees) St. Louis County, Dec. 1, 2006
■ $11.1 million plaintiff verdict, Owens v. Contigroup Cos. (hog odor nuisance) Jackson County, March 4, 2010
■ $1.95 million plaintiff verdict, McGuire v. Synergy (hog odor nuisance) Henry County, May 7, 2011
■ $1 million settlement, State of Missouri v. Premium Standard Farms Inc. (Clean Water Act violations) Jackson County, Sept. 1, 2010
■ $285,000 settlement, Greene v. Dunsing (lead poisoning) St. Louis, Nov. 6, 2008
■ Defense verdict, Miller v. Shane Spalding Construction Inc. (construction defect, toxic mold) Callaway County, May 25, 2007
■ Defense verdict, Specialty Medical Sales Inc. v. Deeb D. Development Inc. (toxic mold in workplace) St. Louis, April 25, 2007
■ Defense verdict, Ballard v. Hudson (lead paint exposure) Boone County, Feb. 19, 2009
■ Defense verdict, Hanes v. Premium Standard Farms (hog odor nuisance) DeKalb County, June 22, 2011
Sources: Missouri Lawyers Weekly V&S Search database, archives
