$100 Million Verdict Against Pharmacia for PCB Exposure at Sky Valley Education Center
Won by Friedman Rubin.
A King County jury awarded $100 million to four plaintiffs who suffered neurological, hormonal, and cancer-related illnesses after years of exposure to PCBs from defective fluorescent light fixtures at a Monroe, Washington school.
What happened
Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, Washington, operated for years with fluorescent light ballasts and caulking that contained polychlorinated biphenyls, a class of industrial chemicals Monsanto manufactured for decades under the trade name Aroclor. When the ballasts aged and cracked, PCBs off-gassed into classrooms. Students, teachers, and staff breathed and ingested them year after year.
More than 200 people connected to the school eventually brought claims, alleging the exposure caused a range of serious conditions including neurological impairment, thyroid dysfunction, endocrine disruption, and cancer. Pharmacia LLC, the Monsanto corporate spinoff that inherited liability for the PCB product line, has faced a succession of trials in King County over the Sky Valley contamination.
The Rose case, filed as Gunnar L.G. Rose et al. v. Pharmacia LLC (No. 87281-8), placed fifteen plaintiffs before a King County jury beginning in October 2024. Henry Jones, Richard Friedman, and colleagues at Friedman Rubin PLLP tried the case alongside attorneys from Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala and Trial Lawyers for Justice. The plaintiff teams presented blood, air, and tissue testing to show elevated PCB levels in their clients, and argued that Pharmacia had known of the health risks for decades while marketing the chemicals as safe and suppressing contrary evidence.
The jury agreed on both counts for four of the fifteen plaintiffs, finding that Pharmacia supplied an unsafe and defectively designed product and had intentionally misrepresented facts or concealed information about PCB hazards. On January 14, 2025, after a trial that ran from October, the jury returned a verdict of $25 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages, totaling $100 million. The remaining eleven plaintiffs did not prevail. Pharmacia announced plans to pursue post-trial motions and an appeal.
The verdict added to more than $1.1 billion in prior losses Pharmacia faced from earlier Sky Valley trials, and was one of several hundred-million-dollar results in the litigation series.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.