For a third time, defendant companies have called for the dismissal of a long-running class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Glades residents that accuses sugar cane growers of endangering public health through the practice of pre-harvest burning.
In a Dec. 16 filing in the Southern District of Florida, attorneys representing sugar care farmers accused plaintiffs of failing to prove they were harmed by the defendant companies through visible or invisible particulate matter from the burns. Plaintiffs have filed three amended complaints alleging that the controlled burns, which remove leaves and debris prior to harvesting, leads to increased air pollution in nearby communities.
“Plaintiffs now allege that one-sixtieth of the alleged impacts after correcting for an ‘input error’ in their models in the (second amended complaint),” the defendants’ response states. “But even the sharply reduced modeling results are contradicted by actual, publicly available monitoring data confirming that air quality in the putative class area is safe.”
The Berman Law Group, which filed the class action, has said that more than 80,000 individual sugar cane burn events have taken place between 2009 and 2019, sending a wide range of pollutants into the air that have endangered Glades residents’ health.
A spokeswoman for one of the defendants, U.S. Sugar, said Glades communities are committed to safe, responsible farming techniques.
"Government data, which is publicly available in near real time, repeatedly shows that our air quality is some of the cleanest in the state of Florida," Judy Sanchez told The Record in an email. "As members of the community for generations, we know first-hand how critically important air quality is, and we will continue to rely on this data to know our air is healthy and clean. These facts do not change because plaintiffs' lawyers and activists would like some to believe otherwise. However inconvenient, these facts demonstrate that their claims are baseless and without merit.”
A source familiar with the defendants’ filings told The Record that plaintiffs have made unfounded claims, including an effort to compare controlled sugarcane burns, which last under 20 minutes, to a California wildfire that burned more than 150,000 acres and went on for 17 days.
A report published by U.S. Sugar in August points to Florida Department of Environmental Protection data that found the state had the cleanest air on record from 2019 to 2020.
“The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2020 report continues to show that air quality in the Glades community is better than other areas of the state, particularly more densely populated northern communities,” the report states.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys, however, contend that U.S. Sugar has engaged in a public relations campaign to confuse residents about particulate-matter pollution issues and falsely claimed that burning sugarcane has no harmful effects on southern Florida’s air quality.