In a federal lawsuit against Florida sugarcane farmers, plaintiffs’ attorneys have acknowledged errors in their calculations involving the effects of sugarcane harvesting on air quality in the Glades area.
U.S. Sugar, one of the defendants in the case, called the resulting modeling data contained in the plaintiffs’ complaint “grossly inaccurate” and more proof that the case advanced by the Berman Law Group in Boca Raton is groundless.
Plaintiffs allege that the sugar companies’ pre-harvest burning activities degrades the air quality in the southern Florida region and endangers residents’ health. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
“As farmers and members of the community, we rely on science-based approaches and data to guide our harvesting practices and operations,” Judy Sanchez, a spokeswoman for U.S. Sugar, said in a prepared statement. “The admission is further proof that this lawsuit is simply a series of baseless allegations supported by a media campaign intended to mislead folks not familiar with farming in the Glades.”
The plaintiffs’ original legal arguments were partially dismissed in May, but their attorneys filed a subsequent amended complaint containing the inaccurate air-quality projections. Those projections wrongly suggested that air quality in the Glades communities equaled the pollutant levels during the Mt. St. Helens eruptions, according to U.S. Sugar.
In addition, the plaintiffs’ attorneys did not disclose the errors until 15 days after they were discovered, the U.S. Sugar statement says. If the case advances and the judge allows plaintiffs to file another amended complaint, U.S. Sugar will ask for the case to be dismissed, according to a source familiar with the litigation.
“It takes up judicial resources as well,” the source told the Florida Record, referring to delays resulting from the data errors. “... It costs everybody money.”
The defendants’ Aug. 26 court filing notes that the air-quality modeling put forward by plaintiffs’ attorneys overstated projections by a factor of 60.
“Plaintiffs acknowledge that they learned of the ‘input error’ more than two weeks earlier on Aug. 11,” the defendants’ response to the plaintiffs’ motion to file a third amended class-action complaint states. “But plaintiffs took no immediate action to notify defendants or the court or to otherwise correct the public record.”
An Aug. 26 declaration filed with the court by Randy Horsak, an engineer and scientist with 3TM Consulting LLC in Houston, contends that despite the data error, the overall regulatory model advanced by the plaintiffs was sound.
“AERMOD (an air pollution model developed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency) results are reliable with the corrected input data files,” Horsak stated. “The 60x input error does not in any way detract from the reliability of the AERMOD modeling using correct input files.”
The defendants reject the plaintiffs’ overall conclusions, arguing that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s data shows air quality in the Glades area is clean and healthy, despite the farmers’ use of controlled burns to remove outer leaves on sugarcane prior to harvests.