With few local experts to consult and allegations piling up that sewage sludge spread as fertilizer causes illnesses, Peter Angelos is taking the lead.
Angelos, the Baltimore Orioles owner who made his fortune on asbestos lawsuits, and Chris Nidel, an environmental attorney from Washington D.C., filed a lawsuit with the York, Pa., courts, seeking unspecified damages from local offices of the country’s largest sludge-hauling company, Synagro Technologies Inc., for 35 residents of Shrewbury, Pa., a town 26 miles north of Towson in Baltimore County.
The residents in the lawsuit filed this summer allege that the sludge, human waste treated at a wastewater treatment plant and spread
on a nearby farm, damaged their property and caused bloody noses, headaches, irritated eyes, fatigue and respiratory ailments.
Edwin Hallman, an environmental attorney from Atlanta, who is considered one of the country’s top lawyers in sludge-related lawsuits, said, “Mr. Angelos filing this suit is a clear sign that the toxic torts attorneys are finally realizing the effects of this stuff.”
Angelos, who could not be reached for comment, was one of the first attorneys in the country to file lawsuits against asbestos companies. He made hundreds of millions of dollars representing thousands of Baltimore residents who were sickened by asbestos, an insulating and fire-retardant material that can cause cancer but was once thought to be safe.
The Baltimore City branch and Maryland State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had to take their search for counsel on sludge earlier this year all the way to Georgia.
NAACP officials have been consulting for several months with Hallman about a Johns Hopkins University study involving a sludge compost that was spread around houses in Baltimore.
Synagro could not be reached for comment on the Pennsylvania lawsuit, but its officials have repeatedly denied that sludge causes adverse health effects.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has supported spreading sludge as fertilizer, saying it has never been proven to cause an illness.
Hallman’s most recent case ended in February, with a victory in U.S. District Court over the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He won the case for a Georgia dairy farmer, Andy McElmurray, whose fields and award-winning cattle were destroyed by sludge that contained hundreds of times more heavy metals than permitted.
“I’m really pleased to see somebody of his caliber signing on,” Hallman said of Angelos. “I think we’re going to see more and more attorneys like him, myself and others communicating.”
