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A couple living about a mile from the Atlanta-area BioLab chemical plant that caught fire last week and belched toxic plumes of smoke and gas into the air has filed a class action lawsuit against the company.
BioLab produces chemicals used in pools, such as chlorine. On Sunday, a fire started at the building and was ignited by water from a sprinkler malfunction. The result was a massive plume of smoke that could be seen for miles. 17,000 residents in the surrounding area were forced to evacuate. Now, residents are being told to shelter in place.
Fannie and Albert Tartt, who live a little over a mile from the plant, brought the lawsuit on behalf of themselves and the more than 90,000 residents in Conyers, Georgia who claims to have had their property damaged as a result of the fire.
The class action lawsuit claims negligences, nuisance, trespass, and punitive damages. “Defendants knew or should have known of the risk that a fire at the Conyers Plant would result in the release of toxic and harmful smoke into the surrounding neighborhood and communities,” the complaint states.
In addition to damages, the lawsuit demands that BioLab provide all Conyers residents with particulate masks and high-efficiency air filters, and that it do a full cleanup of the affected area, including washing buildings and streets. It also demands the lab conduct “immediate testing and sampling of the air and groundwater to detect the presence of toxins and other chemicals potentially hazardous to human health.”
The lawsuit focuses on property damage, however. “When people return to their homes and they have to repair or replace clean up things, they are damaged,” attorney Daniel Flynn said at a press conference on Tuesday, Georgia Public Broadcasting reported. “When people's property values drop because people know that there's a factory in town that repeatedly pollutes the town, they're damaged.”
“Bio-Lab did not have an adequate fire protection system in order to quickly and effectively extinguish fires at their facility while also avoiding causing dangerous chemical reactions with water-reactive chemicals,” the complaint claims. “Bio-Lab’s failure to possess and utilize an effective fire protection system exacerbated the harm caused by the fire at the Conyers Plant and delayed emergency response to the fire.”
The complaint notes that this isn’t the first time a fire at the plant forced residents out of their homes: In 2004, “plumes of gray, green and white smoke” from the plant prompted evacuations within a 1.5-mile radius in Conyers, NBC reported at the time. A smaller fire broke out in 2016. In 2020, after winds from Hurricane Laura damaged the lab’s buildings, rainwater contacted the chemicals stored inside and started a chemical reaction that started a fire, and “the decomposition released a large plume of hazardous gases, including toxic chlorine, into the air,” a U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board report of the incident said. “A plume of hazardous gases crossed the facility boundary and could be seen over a large portion of the nearby community.
Rockdale County Fire Chief Marian McDonald told local news outlet WSB-TV that this was “probably the 3rd event of this magnitude” in the seven years she’d worked as a firefighter in the area.
Meteorologists warn that as winds shift, the plume is predicted to move back toward Atlanta this week.
