San Diego lawyers sue Synagro, Goldman Sachs over noxious Hinkley waste-pit fire
A team of San Diego law firms has filed suit against Synagro Technologies Inc. and a Wall Street titan whose investing arm owns the green-branded waste handler, marking the first lawsuit to come over a two-month fire in its open-air High Desert waste pit.
The Law Offices of Gregory J. Hout and the Schack Law Group submitted a complaint on Aug. 4 to San Bernardino County Superior Court alleging myriad harms and demanding a jury trial against Maryland-based Synagro and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the New York mega-bank in charge of a private equity fund that bought Synagro in late 2020.
The lawyers filed the suit on behalf of 31 named residents in the area of Barstow and Hinkley, the unincorporated town where decades of water contamination cost Pacific Gas and Electric a $333 million settlement and won Julia Roberts an Oscar for “Erin Brockovich.” It’s not the last lawsuit they have in the cards.
“This is the first of at least two complaints which will be filed,” Hout told the Daily Press in an email. “The second complaint will be on behalf of guardians of minor children, individually and on behalf of the minors.”
Synagro and Goldman Sachs didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The complaint cites numerous details exclusively reported by the Daily Press since late May when a fire began in Synagro’s 80-acre pit of sewage, wood, and industrial waste. The blaze has fueled months of complaints of rancid air and erratic ailments for dozens of miles from the officially-dubbed Nursery Products Hawes Composting Facility.
Rather than stake out a specific dollar-figure penalty for the court to pursue against Synagro and Goldman Sachs, the complaint demands a “trial by jury on each and every triable issue.”
“Plaintiffs are entitled to punitive and exemplary damages in an amount to be proven at trial,” it states. Punitive damages are a form of court-ordered punishment meant specifically to punish and prevent future actions by a defendant, such as Synagro, while exemplary damages are geared toward rewarding an alleged victim, such as the people of Hinkley.
Five overarching causes of action over the waste-pit fire are asserted by the complaint, accusing the corporate defendants of:
Negligence
Strict liability for ultrahazardous activity
Trespass
Public nuisance
Private nuisance
The allegations, as described in the complaint reviewed by the Daily Press, are based on the “Defendants’ Operation of a Dangerous Waste Facility and Their Violation of State Regulations,” a “History of Misconduct and Repeated Violations,” and “Contamination of the Neighboring Areas and the Effect of the Dangerous Conditions at the Facility.”
Suit cites noxious gases, odors, toxins and more
The complaint alleges Synagro and Goldman Sachs “allowed dangerous conditions to persist that caused the release of smoke, noxious or offensive gases, odors, pollutants, physical or particulate matter, toxins, contaminants and/or chemicals (…) for areas within 25 miles from the Facility and beyond, including in Hinkley.”
It cites years of smaller waste-pit fires and unresolved problems fueling local questions, including that county inspectors cited the Synagro site for 39 violations from November 2020 to April this year, which the Daily Press first reported in a June 19 analysis.
Those violations included a surprise check finding more than five times the legal limit of film-plastic contamination in a ready-to-go Synagro compost load on March 23 and the site taking “unacceptable feedstock” in the form of mixed waste — sewage solids such as “non-organics, processed industrial materials, mixed demolition or mixed construction debris, or plastics” — and brewery muck from an Anheuser-Busch factory near Los Angeles.
The Hinkley site is permitted to accept and compost only two forms of waste: “biosolids,” or semi-cleaned organic sewage such as human feces, and “green materials” such as wood.
A closer look: What are the ‘bio-solids’ burning in toxic Mojave Desert inferno? You may not want to know
‘A history of dangerous conditions’
Only four other facilities have a permit to compost biosolids in California, according to a Daily Press analysis of CalRecycle data. These sites also take a few other kinds of waste, though, while inspection data shows biosolids make up the vast majority of “wet tons” recorded as intake at the Hinkley site.
The complaint also references a violation noted two days before the fire began, first reported in July by the Daily Press, in which inspectors found the site had taken in excess loads of waste from across Southern California on at least 12 days in April and May, breaking the 2,000-ton-per-day maximum allowed by its permit.
“The Facility has a history of dangerous conditions and ignoring State regulations,” the complaint alleges. “Defendants knew or should have known that the Facility was accepting excessive waste, accepting waste with excessive contamination levels, processing unacceptable forms of waste, allowing litter to accumulate on the property, and failing to control fires.”
The lawyers also cited a Daily Press report on July 21 analyzing Mojave Desert Air Quality Management District records and data, which found that the Synagro fire fueled a 144% spike in air-contaminant complaints throughout the region in the first six months of this year. The Hinkley site was the subject of more than 200 such complaints in that time, equ about two-thirds of all complaints received by the Mojave Desert AQMD.
A major focus of the complaint is the myriad of health problems that residents have reported and attributed to the waste-pit fumes flooding the air outside and at times within their homes.
“Residents in this area have reported pungent and unbearable odors, smoke and matter in the air (…) headaches, nausea, respiratory problems and animal illness,” the complaint states. “On many occasions, the smell and air is so unbearable that Plaintiffs and/or members of the public have been forced to turn off air coolers.”
As a result of these effects, according to the complaint, “Plaintiffs have sustained further property damage and loss of use and enjoyment of their properties.” It also alleges the fire has caused locals “mental pain and suffering,” medical expenses, and “loss of earning capacity.”
The forms of relief requested in the complaint are essentially limitless, opening the door to a massive fine if a jury trial moves forward and rules in favor of High Desert residents. It also requests that Synagro and Goldman Sachs provide “medical monitoring” for potential effects on those who’ve inhaled the waste-pit fumes.
“The conduct of Defendants was oppressive, malicious, and despicable in that it was intentional and done in conscious disregard for the rights and safety of others,” the complaint alleges.
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Charlie McGee covers California’s High Desert for the Daily Press, focusing on the city of Barstow and its surrounding communities. He is also a Report for America corps member with The GroundTruth Project, an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists in the U.S. and around the world. McGee may be reached at 760-955-5341 or cmcgee@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @bycharliemcgee.
This article originally appeared on Victorville Daily Press: San Diego lawyers sue Synagro, Goldman Sachs over Hinkley waste fire
