Just weeks after a Cook County jury handed a cancer survivor a record $363 million award against Sterigenics, a judge ruled Friday that the 800-plus other plaintiffs suing the company over allegedly toxic emissions from its Willowbrook plant can take their cases to trial in groups.
The ruling by Judge James Flannery will speed the progress of lawsuits against Sterigenics, which last month saw a jury award 70-year-old Susan Kamuda $38 million in damages and another $325 million in punitive damages in the first case to go trial, said Patrick Salvi II, the attorney representing Kamuda and more than 200 other plaintiffs who have sued Sterigenics over illnesses linked to ethylene oxide emitted by the Willowbrook facility.
“This is a step in the right direction, and one we hope will lead to these cases moving more quickly through the courts,” Salvi said after a hearing Friday at Daley Center.
Jurors found that ethylene oxide emissions from a medical equipment sanitizing facility near her home caused Kamuda to develop breast cancer in 2007, after living near the Sterigenics facility in Willowbrook for 20 years.
Sterigenics attorneys said after the verdict the company would fight the award. A company spokeswoman for the company did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Friday’s ruling.
Two plaintiffs’ cases— one of them Kamuda’s son, Brian— will move forward individually this spring. Consolidated cases of three to four plaintiffs, whose claims against Sterigenics are similar, head to trial in front of the same judge and jury starting in May.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs and Sterigenics will decide which plaintiffs present similar fact patterns, such as the type of illnesses they developed or the amount of time they lived near the Willowbrook operation, Salvi said. A hearing on the first groups of consolidated cases is set for November.
The first cases against Sterigenics and other companies tied to the Willowbrook plant were filed in 2018, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published research showing people living nearby developed cancer at rates nine times the national average.
The Willowbrook plant had been releasing ethylene oxide from 1985 until a temporary shutdown was ordered by state authorities in 2019. Sterigenics has since permanently closed the plant.
