Negligence In Woburn

A Civil Action portrays a fictional account of the real legal case pertaining to the hazardous waste site in Woburn, Mass. The waste site affected its surroundings, and in particular, Woburn, Mass. The waste site contaminated the river in which the community of Woburn used to drink from. Due to the water contamination, the children in Woburn have been dying of Leukemia. Although we are still ignorant of the exact cause of Leukemia, the contaminated water did affect people.
W.R. Grace, the company that contaminated the water, is guilty of negligence. The company failed to take reasonable care to protect the community of Woburn from harm. I personally see three main elements of negligence in this court case. The elements are duty, proximate cause, and damages.

First of all, every company is responsible to provide a presence of a duty of care.

A presence of care can be as simple as a mother feeding her child, teacher protecting his or her students from an intruder, or making sure the passengers in your car are wearing seatbelts. W.R. Grace failed to provide a presence of care to the community of Woburn. The way W.R. Grace waterproofed their leather was unsafe to the environment and affected the Woburn community tremendously. They simply poured hazardous chemicals, in particular trichloroethylene, on hanging leather. Just like if you poured water on a table, the trichloroethylene spilled and went onto the ground. Eventually, the trichloroethylene contaminated the water. As well as the barrels and excess debri the company threw into the river. W.R. Grace fails to provide care for contaminating water or even fails to prevent this in the first

place.
Moreover, every company is legally obligated to recognize responsibility and be held for the cause of an injury. The contaminated water was most likely the cause of why so many children obtained leukemia and a couple died from leukemia. W.R. Grace argued that they were not the cause of the river being contaminated, thus meaning they were not responsible to the occurrence in Woburn community. Finally, the court requires every company to compensate for any damages. Although they were mandated to do this once the Environmental Protection Agency was involved, W.R. Grace did not compensate beforehand. The company ignored the responsibility to provide funds and simply apologize, which is all they wanted, to the families who lost or were affected by the contaminated water.
A defence W.R. Grace attorneys attempted to use was rule 11. Rule 11 “provides that a district court may sanction attorneys or parties who submit pleadings for an improper purpose or that contain frivolous arguments or arguments that have no evidentiary support.” The attorney for W.R. Grace attempted to convince the judge that Mr. Schlichtmann and his firm did not find proper evidence for the court case to be valid. However, the judge overturned this immediately.
Justice has a price. That statement is shown in the movie when Mr. Shlichtmann and a small firm attempted to sue a company long term. The small firm eventually went bankrupt and did not reach a settlement with the company W.R. Grace. Justice was served when the Environmental Protection Agency stepped in.
I believe Anne Anderson has a huge role to the meaning of this movie. She said, “it’s not about the money.” The whole movie shows that companies and the people who work in these companies can easily be corrupted by money. At the beginning, Mr. Schlichtmann was not in it to provide justice to for the people of Woburn; Mr. Schlichtmann saw the case would be a “gold mine” if they won the case. W.R. Grace did everything they could to protect their company from being shut down because if they were shut down, they would lose their net gain of about 600mil dollars per year.
Mr. Schlichtmann eventually went bankrupt trying to win the case for the people of Woburn. W.R. Grace was “won” until finally the Environmental Protection Agency got involved. But both the small firm of Mr. Schlichtmann and the major company or W.R. Grace, at one point or another, did not see that the people of Woburn just wanted an apology. They would have been okay with the water contamination if W.R. Grace simply had someone apologize for their negligence.