After more than 15 years of litigation and appeals, lawyers reached a settlement with an insurance company for those affected by contaminated water on Tucson's South Side more than 25 years ago.
The details of the settlement were not released by the lawyers for the case because those with claims have not agreed to the terms yet, said Fred Baron, a lawyer from Dallas who has been working on the case.
The lawyers will meet with about 1,200 of the 1,618 plaintiffs in the case this weekend at Sunnyside High School to discuss the details of the settlement. If the clients agree to the amount their claim was settled for, they could have their share of the money within a few weeks, said Baron, who worked with local attorney Richard Gonzales.
Baron said he thinks clients will be happy when they hear the news at the meetings.
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"They'll be glad to it get over with and with the amount of money."
The suit, against Associated Aviation Underwriters, was brought by people who lived on the South Side when water supplies there were contaminated with trichloroethylene, or TCE, an industrial cleaning chemical used as a degreaser for airplanes.
Associated Aviation Underwriters insured the airport from 1960 to 1972. TCE was found in South Side wells in 1981.
TCE is known to cause cancer in lab animals, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. Drinking, swimming and showering in TCE-contaminated water are all methods of exposure to the chemical. Some residents in that area have lost many family members to various diseases, including cancer, since the early 1980s.
The residents of the area started suffering from illnesses, but didn't know they were extraordinary or that they could have been linked to the contamination, residents said.
"I watched the people that just died. As a young woman there, I didn't understand it, I thought all of America was dying of cancer," said Joe Lanier, 71. Lanier is a plaintiff in the case and lived on the South Side with her children and near her parents at the time the contaminated wells were discovered.
"We knew we had a lot of illnesses, but we thought that what we had everybody had," said Rose Augustine, another plaintiff in the case. "It was quite shocking when we found out what had happened to our water."
A number of lawsuits were filed after the contamination was discovered. Among them, suits against Hughes Aircraft Co., which settled for $85 million in 1991. The Airport Authority also settled, but under the condition the money be collected from the agencies that insured the Airport Authority from 1948 through the mid- 1980s, Baron said.
Those who will be receiving money from the settlement said they hope the lawsuits remind people of what happened.
"A lot of people have forgotten what has happened on the South Side of town, they don't even want to think about it," said Augustine, who has been a plaintiff in the cases since 1985. "But I'm hoping that people will remember by these lawsuits that our water was poisoned and that people have to keep very vigilant about their environment."
Hopefully the health problems and lawsuits aren't written off as a one-time thing, said Lanier, who has lost many family members, including two in the past year, to various cancers and lymphoma.
"If they don't monitor those wells, the generation that is here today, and they don't proceed to keep them closed down, then we're going to be right back to where we were," Lanier said. "And we won't be here to fight it."
