Health, Safety & the Environment

Colin Gustafson reported in this morning’s Greenwich Time that a group of outspoken Hamilton Avenue School parents have filed suit against the Town of Greenwich, Miller Building Systems, Inc. (a modular manufacturer), and Carp Building Structures, Inc. (a builder) in Stamford Superior Court alleging inter alia that the Town of Greenwich’s failure to address persistent mold-related problems at in temporary modular classrooms has resulted in a slew of personal injuries, including strep throat, ear and sinus infections, coughs, nose bleeds, dizziness, nausea,” neurological symptoms” and “auto-immune conditions”.  The parents retained as counsel the law firm of Silver, Golub & Teitell, LLP, one of the preeminent personal injury law firms in Connecticut.  The filing of  the lawsuit will shift the debate from local public forums to the courthouse.  To date, the parents have been demanding that the Town  address what they perceive as a health hazard in the temporary facility.  Now they are demanding money for alleged personal injuries.  In communities where toxic tort cases are filed, the results of a toxic tort filing are often polarizing.  First, the parties can no longer speak directly to each other without the presence of counsel.  Second, the plaintiffs that have been active at public meetings now have an agenda that separates them from other concerned parents who have not retained counsel and filed suit.  Whether justified or not, public activism by personal injury plaintiffs is often viewed by a town that has been targeted in a lawsuit as an unfair attempt at pressuring the town to settle rather than the legitimate expression of ideas in a public forum.  A mold personal injury case is not an easy case to win.  Prospective jurors and their families routinely come down with colds, sore throats and minor respiratory ailments.  Even in cases where jurors have found liability in mold cases, the jury awards in these cases are often modest. Why should we award damages, they ask themselves, for symptoms that we routinely suffer from in our daily lives?  The more serious claims of injury–auto immune conditions and neurological symptions–are conditions were the science is unclear.  Many of the mold toxicology experts who have found a causative link between these medical conditions and mold exposures have seen their opinions thrown out of court on the ground that they were not based in good science.  What is not beyond dispute is that the personal injury lawsuit by the Hamilton Avenue School parents, if it runs its course, will continue on long after any mold concerns at the school have been put to rest.