Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Pennsylvania awards damages in stormwater runoff suit
Environment News Service: A Chester County jury has awarded $1.4 million to residents of North Coventry, Pennsylvania whose properties were damaged during construction of a nearby subdivision. In 2005, Christopher and Patricia Washburn and their neighbor, Joan Cleveland, sued the Heritage Building Group, the developers of Coventry Lake Estates, a 57-home subdivision in Pottstown, for polluting ponds on their properties with sediment from stormwater runoff.
The plaintiff property owners told the jury that the Heritage Building Group and a subcontractor, Reading Site Contractors of Pottstown, removed trees and excavated soil on nearly all of the 60-acre subdivision before putting erosion and sediment controls in place.
As a result, about 92,000 cubic feet of sediment ran off the Coventry Lake site and into a seven-acre pond on the Washburn property and a one-acre pond on the Cleveland property. The sediment smothered the two ponds, killing fish and causing algae growth, according to a report Saturday in "The Phoenix," a local newspaper….
Storm drain shot by Robert Lawton, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License
The plaintiff property owners told the jury that the Heritage Building Group and a subcontractor, Reading Site Contractors of Pottstown, removed trees and excavated soil on nearly all of the 60-acre subdivision before putting erosion and sediment controls in place.
As a result, about 92,000 cubic feet of sediment ran off the Coventry Lake site and into a seven-acre pond on the Washburn property and a one-acre pond on the Cleveland property. The sediment smothered the two ponds, killing fish and causing algae growth, according to a report Saturday in "The Phoenix," a local newspaper….
Storm drain shot by Robert Lawton, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License
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