SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) – A San Francisco man who wants Pacific Gas & Electric Company to clean up a portion of the city’s waterfront will be able to make a key part of his case.
That’s because federal judge William Orrick denied the company’s motion to dismiss on April 22, rejecting arguments that plaintiff Dan Clarke’s Clean Water Act was filed much past the statute of limitations.
Orrick has already dismissed parts of Clarke’s case and let other parts continue. His lawsuit, filed by lawyers at Gross & Klein, centers on a manufactured gas plant – the Cannery MGP.
The plant was a “highly polluting” refinery that contaminated the area around it, the lawsuit says.
“The MGP Waste contamination from the Cannery MGP may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to human health and the environment,” the lawsuit says.
PG&E has known about the pollution since at least the 1980s but has not performed an investigation in decades, the lawsuit says.
“(A)t the same time as it has acknowledged its liability for the Additional MGPs, PG&E has denied owning and operating the former Cannery MGP, despite multiple sources of evidence showing that PG&E owned and operated it – including PG&E’s own records and a superficial investigation of the site conducted in 1986,” the suit says.
PG&E said Clarke’s Clean Water Act claims fail because it was enacted in 1972 and doesn’t apply retroactively. The Cannery MGP ceased operating more than 60 years earlier.
The question for Orrick was whether contaminants being periodically transported by groundwater from the Cannery MGP and into the San Francisco Bay is a single occurrence under the CWA or a continuing one.
Finding case law to rely on tough, Orrick said the question will have to wait until the summary judgment state and may require expert testimony.