NEW ORLEANS – A federal judge has swatted down a second environmental lawsuit alleging that a chemical company’s operations have caused medical problems and health risks for the plant’s neighbors in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Judge Martin Feldman of the Eastern District of Louisiana granted the motions of defendants DuPont and Denka Performance Elastomer of LaPlant to dismiss a case filed by plaintiff David Acosta and others, concluding that the plaintiffs lacked a sustainable claim for relief. The allegations against Denka were also similar to a case (Butler v. Denka Performance Elastomer LLC) filed by the same attorney in 2020 – which Feldman also tossed out.
“The defendants are correct that the plaintiffs’ complaint here is largely identical to the complaint dismissed in Butler, and for largely the same reasons provided there, the plaintiffs’ claims here must too be dismissed for failure to state a plausible claim for relief,” Feldman wrote in a decision published last month.
The Baton Rouge attorney handling the case, Danny Russell, said the judge’s ruling does not spell the end of the complaint, which alleges elevated levels of chloroprene, a component of the Neoprene rubber manufactured at the plant, increased health risks for those living nearby.
“The Acosta decision will be appealed,” Russell told the Louisiana Record in an email. “Substantially, the same issues are involved in the Butler appeal. We are awaiting the decision of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Butler.”
Feldman, however, didn’t find the arguments in either the Acosta and Butler cases persuasive.
“The plaintiffs’ claims here are ultimately marred by the same fatal deficiencies as the plaintiff’s claims in Butler,” he said in the Acosta decision, “namely, a failure to state timely claims against the DuPont defendants, and a failure to allege a plausible causal link between the actions of Denka and any concrete injuries befalling the plaintiffs.”
In a statement, Denka said Feldman ruled correctly on the science surrounding the chemical chloroprene. The environmental lawsuits relied on a safety threshold identified in the 2011 National Air Toxics Assessment, but the judge noted that the study “wasn’t designed as a final means to pinpoint specific risk values at local levels.”
In addition, Denka points out that it has cut chloroprene emissions by 85 percent since the company purchased the plant in 2015 and that ambient air monitoring by the federal Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed the emissions reductions.