In the final week of the Obama administration, the Treasury Department made unannounced payments totaling $375 million to Dow Chemical and Boeing to reimburse the two Department of Energy (DOE) contractors for judgments awarded in the 2016 settlement of a lawsuit dating all the way back to 1990. A DOE official who declined to be named confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the payments had been made and that “[t]his contract action arose out of a statutory obligation imposed by the Price-Anderson Act (as amended) to indemnify certain Department of Energy contractors for particular legal liabilities.”
The Denver Post reported the original lawsuit settlement in May 2016 between the two companies and thousands of homeowners in Colorado who lived near the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility. The FBI raided the plant in 1989, and later Rockwell International (purchased by Boeing in 1996) paid millions in fines for Clean Water Act violations. In the lawsuit, homeowners claimed property values were adversely affected by plutonium contamination from the plant.
The case has been in and out of court for a quarter of a century, and while the Department of Energy was not a party to the case, existing legislation indemnified Boeing and Dow against lawsuit awards, as the companies said in statements at the time of the settlement last May. The DOE did not address the indemnification in May, simply telling the Post:
Late last year, however, the DOE agreed to reimburse Dow and Boeing $131,250,000 and $243,750,000 respectively, the exact amounts awarded to plaintiffs in the May settlement. The reimbursement settlement was reached between the companies and the DOE in the US Civilian Board of Contract Appeals on December 13, 2016. A little over a month later on January 17, the payments were made to Boeing and Down from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund. The payments consisted of three payments of $99,999,999, one for $31,250,001, and another for $43,750,002. Neither the DOE nor the Treasury Department released statements at the time of the December settlement nor the January payments.
A spokesperson for Rockwell (the Boeing subsidiary) had told the Post in May 2016 that the compensatory payments to homeowners would likely begin in June or July of 2017. Now that the company has received reimbursement from the federal government, it is unclear if that timetable will be accelerated.
In spite of the settlements and government payout, the case is not yet completely over. The website Law360.com reported on January 13 that the plaintiffs’ attorneys were back in federal court seeking $150 million in fees for their 25 years of work on the case.
