Enter
to a “bankruptcy judge to sort out
whose claims go first.”
On top of all of these past debts
now come the potential legal liabilities that arise, as a natural
consequence, of having put the
lives of 300,000 people at risk
through incompetence. Some 20
lawsuits against Freedom Industries have already been filed. As
Barrett notes, Chapter 11 isn’t just
helping Freedom Industries shelter-in-place against the claims of
creditors and plaintiffs — it’s allowing the company’s lawyers to
float a particularly unique theory
about who is really to blame for
the Elk River chemical spill.
The company’s bankruptcy
attorneys, led by Mark Freedlander of the Pittsburgh office
of McGuire Woods, used Chapter 11 to float a theory designed
to ease Freedom’s liability:
“It is presently hypothesized
that a local water line break
[caused] the ground beneath a
storage tank at the Charleston
facility to freeze in the extraordinary frigid temperatures in
the days immediately preceding” what Freedlander delicately termed “the incident.”
Freedom further hypothesized
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
02.02.14
that “the hole in the affected
storage tank” was caused by
“an object piercing upwards
through the base” of the tank.
Maybe the court will accept
this theory, maybe it won’t. One
hopes that one thing the court
It would be
useful to know more,
but that would obviously
put Freedom Industries’
well-honed competitive edge
in jeopardy, so pertinent
public health information
must necessarily be denied.”
will take away from the discovery
of this steel-penetrating “object,”
however, is that Freedom Industries really can do a bang-up onsite inspection of its facilities
when feeling inspired. Unfortunately, this is the first time since
1991 that the spirit has moved
the company to do so.
More broadly, the strategy here
is to shift the responsibility for
the spill from Freedom Industries to American Water Works
Co., which runs the local water
utility and is a “co-defendant in