A federal judge has agreed to push the trial date in the Hanford Site chemical vapors lawsuit out to Nov. 26, 2018, more than three years after the case was filed.
The new trial date comes after the expiration of the current contract period of one of the plaintiffs, Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), unless the Department of Energy grants the waste tank farm contractor an extension beyond Sept. 30, 2018.
Both plaintiffs and defendants in the lawsuit requested the three-month delay to the trial date and deadlines leading up to the trial as they continue to negotiate a potential settlement. This is the eighth time U.S. District Judge Thomas Rice has issued an amended trial scheduling order, with the majority of those postponing the trial to allow for continued settlement talks.
The next deadline is Feb. 7, 2018, when plaintiffs are required to identify their expert witnesses for the case. The deadline had been moved from Nov. 9, 2017, with no expert identification filing yet listed among public documents filed in U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. The judge has said failure to identify experts in a timely manner could result in exclusion of their testimony.
Washington state, the watchdog group Hanford Challenge, and the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598 filed the case in September 2015 against DOE and WRPS. The plaintiffs are demanding better worker protection against chemical vapors associated with 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, a byproduct of decades of plutonium production at Hanford.
The parties began settlement talks around the first of 2017 after Rice ruled against the plaintiffs’ request for mandatory tank-farm worker protections from chemical vapors until the trial. The judge said while he was taking potential employee health concerns seriously, workers are already being protected by contractor requirements for supplied air respirators for most work within Hanford tank farms.
