ATLANTA — There are more than 20 lawsuits that have been consolidated against BioLab following the chemical plume that emanated from its Conyers facility for weeks after a fire in September.
The lawsuits span a range of defendants, from individuals to businesses. Overseeing them in the Northern District of Georgia federal court in Atlanta is Judge Sarah E. Geraghty.
Judge Geraghty issued an order on Nov. 5 granting the a motion to consolidate brought by plaintiffs from three cases.
At the time the motion was filed in mid-October, it noted 11 other cases ripe (the legal term, essentially meaning appropriate) for consolidation. Judge Geraghty's order a couple weeks later referenced 18 cases, and on Tuesday staff at the District Court confirmed for 11Alive there are now 21 such cases consolidated in the matter.
On Nov. 21, in the latest entry in the case record, Judge Geraghty put out an order stipulating how environmental evidence will be permitted to be collected at the BioLab facility in Conyers and preserved for trial purposes. You can see that order at the bottom of this page.
The mounting legal pressure on BioLab comes as the U.S. Chemical and Safety Hazard Investigation Board this week released its update on the incident, which laid out a timeline the morning a fire triggered sprinkler water that reacted with "pool shock" pool chlorination product inside a storage warehouse.
That reaction resulted in the plume that spewed over Conyers, the wider Rockdale County and, at times, much of surrounding metro Atlanta in early October. Parts of the building where the initial reaction happened collapsed during the fire and the building was destroyed. The Plant 12 building covered an area larger than five football fields and remained an “active emergency response scene” for nearly four weeks, the report says.
The Plant 12 warehouse was a bulk storage area separated from the main warehouse by a firewall and fire shutters, the report says. BioLab told federal investigators they had established a permanent fire watch two or three months before the event “after detecting strong odors from oxidizers in two storage buildings,” including Plant 12.
BioLab said earlier this month that its distribution operations had resumed in Conyers, but that manufacturing operations were still on pause and "any resumption of operations will only be undertaken with approval from authorities and regulators."