Photo of Sky Valley Education Center in 2019
December 19, 2023

Monsanto to Pay $857 Million for Toxic Chemical Leak in alternative school.

THE DECISION

On December 18, a Washington state jury awarded five former students and two parent volunteers with $857 million for their claim that the PCBs leaking from the light fixtures at Sky Valley Education Center caused them to develop injuries, like brain damage and autoimmune disorders. Notably, the verdict consisted of $73 million in compensatory damages and a whopping $784 million in punitive damages in an effort to punish the manufacturer of the PCBs, the Monsanto Company. 

Recognize that name? Monsanto is the agrochemical company that developed Roundup and was later acquired by pharmaceutical giant Bayer AG in 2018. For years, Bayer and Monsanto have been facing a mountain of legal troubles with thousands of lawsuits claiming that Roundup exposure caused plaintiffs to develop various forms of blood cancer.

WHY WERE THE LIGHT FIXTURES DANGEROUS?

The fluorescent lights installed in Sky Valley Education Center were made with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are a group of synthetic organic chemicals that were formerly used in hundreds of different applications. Originally produced in 1929, PCBs were once regularly found in coolants, lubricants, plasticizers, pigments, and many other products. Throughout the decades, research about the various negative health effects caused by PCBs continued to develop until the chemicals were eventually banned from being manufactured by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1979.

WHAT MADE MONSANTO LIABLE?

The jury found that Monsanto sold PCBs to commercial and industrial developers for decades, up until industrial manufacturers halted production of PCBs in 1977 due to health concerns. By the mid 1960s, the dangers of PCBs were well-known to both Monsanto and the public, but Monsanto continued to produce them until it was pressured by the industry to stop.

According to the jury, Monsanto had a duty to warn buyers of its PCBs– both before and after PCBs stopped being produced in 1977– about the chemical compound’s dangerous effects on humans, and the company failed to adequately uphold that duty. Monsanto claimed that the Sky Valley Education Center was told repeatedly since the 1990s that the light fixtures needed to be retrofitted, but that did not qualify as an adequate warning to the jury.

This failure to warn its customers would later come back to haunt Bayer and Monsanto in dozens of future lawsuits. According to Law360, the two merger companies already owe nearly $900 million from previous verdicts related to the Sky Valley Education Center alone, bringing all the combined verdicts up to over $1.7 billion in damages. 

Bayer and Monsanto will be appealing to overturn the $857 million verdict, just as they have appealed the previous Sky Valley decisions.

Featured photo taken in 2019 by Ted S. Warren with AP News.

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