A Rankin County judge will rule next week on a pair of pivotal motions in the city of Brandon's lawsuit against Gold Coast Commodities.
On August 18 at 1:30 p.m. I Brandon, Rankin County Circuit Judge Steve Ratcliff will hear arguments about two motions in the city's lawsuit against the chemical manufacturer.
Gold Coast uses a proprietary process to transform used cooking oil and soapstock — which is a byproduct which originates from the refining of soybean and other oils — into animal feed and biodiesel using sulfuric acid. The wastewater from this process is extremely acidic and has to be kept at a high temperature to prevent it from congealing into a pipe-clogging, malodorous sludge.
The city in its lawsuit accuses Gulf Coast of damaging the sewer pipes downstream from its Brandon facility. The company was ordered by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to stop dumping its wastewater into Brandon's system in 2016, but sewer pipes excavated in December 2020 showed damage that city attorneys say was likely from Gold Coast wastewater.
The city wants the court to grant summary judgement in the case, which would leave only the awarding of damages to the city from Gold Coast.
One of the motions the court will consider is a Gold Coast one filed on July 28 for the removal from the record of the expert testimony of engineer Nathan Husman. The engineer filed a report after examining some polyvinyl chloride (PVC) sewer pipes that were excavated in December 2020 near Gold Coast.
He said in the inspection report that he'd never witnessed the types of damage (samples of pipe were “out of round” and “egg shaped”) in his 27 years of engineering practice.
Gold Coast attorneys want the judge to throw out Husman's testimony with a Daubert motion, a legal standard based on a 1993 federal case. According to this standard, the judge in the case is the gatekeeper when it comes scientific knowledge of an expert, the relevance, reliability and methodology used in their testimony.
The company says that Husman didn't perform enough research about the temperature of Gold Coast's wastewater to accurately assess blame for the damage to the samples of pipe dug up by the city of Brandon.
Gold Coast continues to fight the revocation of its wastewater permit for its Pelahatchie lagoons by the state Permit Board. The company started using Pelahatchie's site after the DEQ ordered it to stop dumping its wastewater into Jackson's system in 2017.
The city of Jackson filed its own lawsuit against Gold Coast in late June in Hinds County Circuit Court. The owner of the company that dumped Gold Coast wastewater into Jackson's system, Andrew Walker, was indicted last year and later pleaded guilty to federal water pollution charges in a deal with federal prosecutors. Walker's conditions in his plea agreement were placed under seal by the court.
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Rankin County judge will hear arguments Wednesday on two pivotal motions in Brandon's case against Gold Coast - Northside Sun
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