A federal judge has pushed out the date of the bench trial in the Hanford Site chemical vapors lawsuit until September 2019, about four years after the case was filed.
Judge Thomas Rice, of U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington state, on Thursday granted a joint request from parties to the case to reschedule the trial – for an 11th time. That will allow for a continuation of talks that began in late 2016 to reach a settlement in the case.
Under the new case schedule, the next deadline is Oct. 9 for plaintiffs to identify their experts. The trial at the Richland, Wash., federal courthouse has been delayed about 10 weeks to Sept. 9, 2019. It had originally been set for May 22, 2017.
Washington state, the watchdog group Hanford Challenge, and the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598 sued the Department of Energy and its Hanford tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, in September 2015. They are demanding better protection from chemical vapors for the workers at the site’s storage tank farms, saying inhaling chemicals associated with radioactive tank waste has caused serious illnesses.
Hanford stores 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste, the byproduct of the site’s history of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
Most of the delays in the case have been at the request of both plaintiffs and defendants after Rice ruled in November 2016 that current worker protections at the Hanford tank farms, such as supplied air respirators, and other improvements adequately protect workers until trial. But he also said “the court does not deny that vapor exposures have occurred or that employees have experienced serious vapor-related illnesses.”
