A lawsuit by the city of Brandon over alleged damage to its sewer system by Gold Coast Commodities' wastewater will be headed to trial.
Rankin County Circuit Judge Steve Ratcliff dismissed a motion Wednesday by the city of Brandon for summary judgement, which would've left only the awarding of damages in the case.
His rationale was that since circuit judges are not called upon to be fact finders like a chancery court judge, a jury trial was required. He also said that summary judgment was the most reversed issue at the appeals court level, something which had only happened to him three times in the last 11 years on the bench.
Ratcliff also dismissed a pair of motions that would've eliminated the testimony of the city's expert witnesses. Gold Coast attorneys had filed two Daubert motions, a legal standard based on a 1993 federal case. According to this standard, the judge in the case is the gatekeeper when it comes scientific knowledge of an expert and the relevance, reliability and methodology of their testimony and can reject expert witnesses who don't meet the standard.
The two witnesses — civil engineer Nathan Husman and Kimberly Steiner, a chemist who specializes in failure analysis and corrosion — will be able to testify at the upcoming trial, that date for which has not been set by the court.
Attorneys for Gold Coast argued that since Steiner, who has a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a master's degree in chemistry, was unqualified to offer testimony since she had never taken college-level classes or published any peer-reviewed papers about iron sewer pipes or sewer systems like the ones allegedly damaged by Gold Coast wastewater
The company's attorneys blame the sewer pipe damage on now-defunct Reckitt Benckiser facility located adjacent to Gold Coast's Brandon facility.
The city of Brandon filed its lawsuit in July 2019 after a 2016 investigation found that Gold Coast was discharging its wastewater into the city's sewer. Gold Coast uses a proprietary process to transform used cooking oil and soapstock — which is a byproduct which originates from the refining of soybean and other oils — into animal feed and biodiesel using sulfuric acid. The wastewater from this process is extremely acidic and has to be kept at a high temperature to prevent it from congealing into a pipe-clogging, malodorous sludge.
It also can corrode pipes, which Husman detailed in his report on the possible causes of the pipe damage. The motion filed against his testimony and statements in court by Gold Coast attorneys said he hadn't used proper scientific methods in exhausting all of the possible causes of corrosion in the pipes.
The company was ordered by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to cease dumping its wastewater into Brandon's system in 2016.
Husman filed a report after examining some polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sewer pipes that were excavated in December 2020 near Gold Coast.
He said in the inspection report that he'd never witnessed the types of damage (samples of pipe were “out of round” and “egg shaped”) in his 27 years of engineering practice.
Gold Coast continues to try to overturn revocation of its wastewater permit for its Pelahatchie lagoons by the state Permit Board. The company started using Pelahatchie's site (after reaching a deal in 2014) after the DEQ ordered it to stop dumping its wastewater into Jackson's system in 2017.
The city of Jackson filed its own lawsuit against Gold Coast in late June in Hinds County Circuit Court. The owner of the company that dumped Gold Coast wastewater into Jackson's system, Andrew Walker, was indicted last year and later pleaded guilty to federal water pollution charges in a deal with federal prosecutors. Walker's conditions in his plea agreement were placed under seal by the court.
