Trial opens in tainting of homes' well water

Several Santa Rosa residents faced off in court this week against Union Pacific Railroad and JDS Uniphase, companies they contend tainted their wells with potentially cancer-causing chemicals.

"The evidence will show how their business practices contaminated the environment, how it contaminated the ground water and how it entered the defendants' wells," attorney Joseph Gonzalez of Westlake Village said in opening statements Tuesday in a civil trial in Sonoma County Superior Court.

Gonzalez linked at least part of the pollution to land owned by Union Pacific on Frances Avenue and to chemical barrels from Optical Coating Laboratories Inc. found at that property and an adjacent parcel.

The property was owned by Southern Pacific, which was taken over by Union Pacific in 1996, and OCLI became part of JDS Uniphase in 2000.

Defense attorneys, however, contended the problem was caused by two dry cleaning establishments in the immediate neighborhood, which is a half mile from the Frances Avenue site.

"The plaintiffs' drinking water wells were contaminated; it's just that they were contaminated by the dry cleaners," said attorney John Barg of San Francisco, who was representing Union Pacific.

Barg said the Union Pacific property was badly contaminated by metal recyclers that rented it and by "midnight dumpers" who left toxics there, but the contamination moved west, away from the affected neighborhood.

The remarks Monday were part of opening statements in what is expected to be a four-month jury trial. The first day of testimony was on Wednesday.

At the first day of trial were more than a dozen of the 32 residents in the West College Avenue area where wells for eight properties were contaminated.

"It has been a nightmare," said Annette Wolcott, who grew up in the West College house her father built.

Wolcott said the contamination was discovered in 2000 and her family lived on bottled water for two years before they were connected to city water.

"We had to shower with the windows open; we had to put a charcoal filter on our wells," Wolcott said. "Until you lose something like that, you don't know what you have."

The case has a history of twists and turns. When it first went to trial in 2006, after five years of legal wrangling, a mistrial was declared within two weeks. Sonoma County Superior Court Judge Allan Hardcastle also slapped the residents' attorneys with $2 million in sanctions, which were later overturned by the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco.

The case involves a small neighborhood at West College and Clover Drive where the wells in 1999 were found to be tainted with TCE and PCE -- trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene. Both are suspected of causing cancer.

The residents sought $600 million in damages from the companies and public agencies that they claim were either responsible for the contamination or mishandled the hazard by not properly notifying the community.

Before the trial, the city of Santa Rosa settled for $1.5 million and Sonoma County for $750,000, and the owners of the property where the dry cleaners were located settled for $400,000.

Gonzalez, representing the residents, said chemicals migrated to the private wells from the Union Pacific property and an adjacent parcel, which also was contaminated during its use as a wrecking yard from 1967 to 1985.

The extent of the pollution was detected by the Santa Rosa Fire Department in 1987, followed by an investigation by the regional water quality board in 1988.

Gonzalez contends Union Pacific knew or should have known about the problem and that when they found out, the company did little to remedy the situation. He asserted that OCLI stored more than 300 drums of chemicals left over from its manufacturing process at the sites.

He showed picture of one site, which was littered with trash, automobile parts and leaky and broken 55-gallon barrels, with large patches of the ground stained black.

Barg admitted the 9.5-acre property owned by Union Pacific at 99 Frances St. was badly polluted with several different chemicals. Three of those were the same as those used in the two dry cleaners in the neighborhood, and it was only those chemicals in the residents' wells, not the others found on the railroad's site, he said.

If the railroad site had been the source, Barg said, all the chemicals from the railroad site would have been detected in the residents' wells.

He said Union Pacific did take action, putting in dozens of monitoring wells, a ground-water extraction system that treated 120 million gallons of contaminated water, and it removed 130,000 cubic yards of contaminated dirt.

OCLI's attorney, John Erickson, said OCLI did not store chemicals at the site and that the barrels there had been sold as scrap metal.

You can reach Staff Writer Bob Norberg at 521-5206 or bob.norberg@

pressdemocrat.com.