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Saturday, July 24, 2004
Judge won't drop downwinders
RICHLAND -- A federal judge has refused to drop from a lawsuit hundreds of people who believe their health was harmed by radioactive releases from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
About 1,800 people have filed lawsuits against former contractors at Hanford, claiming that hey have thyroid disease, cancer or other illnesses because of radioactive material released from the site when plutonium was made during World War II and the Cold War.
Attorneys for contractors at the site have argued that some of the plaintiffs, often called downwinders, filed suit too late and should be dropped from the lawsuit.
The first downwinders lawsuit was filed in 1990. Because Washington has a three-year statute of limitations for personal injury claims, the defense argued that plaintiffs whose illnesses were diagnosed more than three years before the case was filed should be dismissed.
U.S. District Judge William Fremming Nielsen of Spokane ruled Thursday that too many questions of fact remained to dismiss plaintiffs from the case based on statute of limitation arguments. The issue still might come up to be decided at trial.
If Nielsen had agreed to dismiss plaintiffs under the defense's statute of limitations argument, more than half of the bellwether plaintiffs likely would have been removed from the suit, according to the defense.
In 1986, the federal government released 18,920 pages of documents detailing how radioactivity had been released between 1944 and 1972. Most of the releases involved radioactive iodine-131, which has been linked to diseases of the thyroid, including cancer.
Defense attorneys argued that plaintiffs were put on notice then about possible health risks.
But attorneys for the downwinders said that even after the documents were released, tremendous efforts were needed to determine if people had been harmed.
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