KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Legal Newsline) - A Missouri appeals court has allowed a woman to sue Kansas City Power & Light over claims she was exposed to toxic levels of heavy metals during a brief visit to her mother, exposing the utility to liability for emissions from a coal-burning power plant that spread across two states.
The court rejected plaintiff Lona Leann Grosshart’s claims KCP&L was liable for failing to inform her about pollution from the plant, however, and agreed that a 10-year statute of repose barred claims based on her childhood on a farm near the plant in Kansas.
Grosshart was raised on a farm near Pleasanton, Kansas about four miles from the KCP&L plant. The utility allegedly put combustion byproducts including cadmium and other metals in settling ponds, which Grosshart claims released toxins into the groundwater and nearby streams.
Grosshart left the farm in 1986 and subsequently lived in Colorado, various towns in Missouri, New York and Los Angeles. She claims she repeatedly visited the family farm during those years and a 2014 test of the soil found high levels of toxic metals.
Grosshart says she became ill in 2012 with chronic fatigue and other symptoms. Her condition worsened after a nine-week visit with her mother in Butler, Missouri in 2016, which draws its municipal water supply from a river fed by groundwater allegedly polluted by the KCP&L plant. She says she had her hair tested for cadmium before the visit and found normal levels, but her cadmium level increased by 32 times at the end of the visit. After she returned to California a doctor diagnosed her with Sjögren’s Syndrome, a chronic autoimmune disease her doctor attributed to heavy metal exposure.
A trial court dismissed Grosshart’s claims with prejudice, ruling they were barred by Kansas’ statute of repose and Grosshart’s failure to show her medical condition was caused by exposure to KCP&L pollution. The court also ruled against her fraudulent concealment claim, saying the utility didn’t have a duty to disclose what was in its settling ponds to her.
Missouri’s Western District Court of Appeals partially reversed the dismissal in an April 13 decision by Judge Karen King Mitchell. The appeals court ruled, in a first decision on this exact issue, that the 10-year Kansas statute of repose applied in Missouri and barred claims arising from her alleged exposure to toxic metals in Kansas. But accepting all of the plaintiff’s claims as true, the appeals court said her allegations about being exposed to cadmium during the visit with her mother can proceed because they fell within the 10-year limit.
The court agreed with the trial judge that Grosshart didn’t have the type of business or customer relationship with KCP&L allowing her to sue for fraudulent concealment. She can sue the utility for strict liability and negligence, however.