Court Opinion

ID: 9855182
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:20:45.267029+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:23:43.152922
License: Public Domain

Guy, J.
(dissenting) — The majority concludes hazardous wastes at Queen City Farms leaked into the groundwater suddenly over the course of 30 years. Because the majority ignores the plain meaning of Queen City’s insurance policies, I respectfully dissent.
These, I believe, will be some of the consequences of the majority’s opinion: First, the majority’s opinion forecloses future sales of qualified pollution coverage. By finding ambiguity where none exists, the majority’s opinion obliterates any distinction among risks of pollution. The majority concludes the phrase "sudden and accidental” is ambiguous and construes it to mean "unexpected and unintended”. In addition, the majority requires the trier of fact to determine what Queen City subjectively expected or intended. Regardless of what the jury may decide on remand, the majority tells insurers: if you insure any risk of contamination, you insure all. Those individuals or businesses that wish to *115insure against a truly sudden and accidental discharge of pollution and pay a premium limited to that risk will find no such coverage available. They will either purchase expensive environmental impairment liability insurance, placing them in the risk pool with Queen City’s counterparts, or attempt to self-insure against all risk.
This elimination of choices results from the court ignoring clear and unambiguous terms in the qualified pollution exclusion. The majority reads the exclusion to conclude the migration of waste triggers the clause. That clause excludes coverage for discharging pollutants onto the land as well as for failing to contain toxins once in the sludge pit. The exception to the exclusion states: "this exclusion does not apply if such discharge, dispersal, release or escape is sudden and accidental”. (Italics mine.) Clerk’s Papers (Respondent) vol. 1, at 140, vol. 2, at 267. Until the majority’s opinion, the word "or” was disjunctive, requiring the court to interpret each of the four nouns separately. Dumping toxic wastes into the sludge pit is clearly a "discharge . . . of . . . toxic chemicals into or upon land”. Clerk’s Papers (Respondent) vol. 1, at 140. To reach the contrary conclusion, the majority must change "or” to "and” and rely on a legal fiction, the average purchaser. This is a manufactured ambiguity.
The opinion also misinterprets "sudden and accidental”. The majority attempts to distinguish this court’s opinion in Roller v. Stonewall Ins. Co., 115 Wn.2d 679, 801 P.2d 207 (1990), where we concluded:
[Pjursuant to the common sense definition, "accident” is not a subjective term. Thus, the perspective of the insured as opposed to the tortfeasor is not a relevant inquiry. Either an incident is an accident or it is not.
Roller, 115 Wn.2d at 685. The majority sidesteps this ruling by redefining "accidental” as "unintended” and then by judging intent with a subjective standard. Nothing in Roller permits such a step.
Furthermore, the definition of the word "sudden”, to make any sense, must have a temporal element. Contamination of groundwater cannot happen suddenly over 30 years; I con*116sider that a gradual event. The majority notes correctly the court in Anderson & Middleton Lumber Co. v. Lumbermen’s Mut. Cas. Co., 53 Wn.2d 404, 333 P.2d 938 (1959) refused to define sudden as "instantaneous”. However, a single case decided in 1959 does not substitute for analysis. The court in Anderson had evidence of a sudden occurrence — a wobbling bandsaw wheel — sufficient to find coverage. The Anderson court’s definition of sudden as "unforeseen and unexpected” more appropriately defines the term "accidental”.
I believe the phrase "sudden and accidental” is unambiguous, meaning quickly and without warning, design, or intent.
The second consequence results from the majority’s use of a judicially created factor called "the average purchaser of insurance”. This legal fiction enables the majority to disregard the facts of a given agreement as it reaches for the most abstract, formalistic resolution available. The term "average purchaser” appears twice in the majority’s opinion. First, the majority adopts the subjective standard based on this premise: "the average purchaser of insurance would understand that the policy language provides for coverage for damage resulting from most acts of ordinary negligence.” Majority, at 66. Who is this average purchaser? The majority suggests, by analogy, it is the driver of a car who negligently backs up into traffic. Majority, at 66.
The court’s use of the fictional average purchaser obscures the substantial diversity in the sophistication of buyers and sellers, the types of insurance, the negotiations preceding a purchase, and the language of a given policy. Here, educated business people, well versed in insurance contracts, purchased comprehensive general liability policies, not homeowners or automobile insurance. The court’s reduction of complex business transactions into simplistic maxims only benefits the court’s resolution of these cases. We do no favors to the buyers of commercial policies when we equate their knowledge of insurance to an automobile driver’s understanding of a collision deductible.
The average purchaser appears a second time at another critical point in the majority’s opinion. To justify defining *117the polluting event as escape from, rather than discharge into, the sludge pit, the majority announces this unsupported assumption:
It seems to us that an average purchaser of insurance in earlier years would have been justified in thinking that there was coverage for the placement of wastes into a waste pit, or a landfill, which was expected to contain the wastes and from which it was not expected that they would discharge, disperse, release, or escape into the groundwater ....
Majority, at 79.8 Ronald Kokesh, Queen City’s insurance broker, made no such assumption. On December 23, 1965, Kokesh intentionally misrepresented to the insurers Queen City’s information about the waste pits in order to obtain insurance. A substantial gap exists between the majority’s speculation about an average purchaser’s thoughts and what actually happened in this case.
Third, the court would reward the irresponsible polluter. By adopting a subjective standard to judge both whether damage from an occurrence was unexpected and unintended and whether discharge of pollution was sudden and accidental, owners of sludge pits, toxic waste dumps, landfills, and other Superfund sites need only plead ignorance and thereby escape responsibility. The majority accepts the plea of the polluters, noting "in the late 1960’s little was known about environmental danger posed by sanitary landfills; few recognized the extent to which landfills threatened pollution of groundwater.” Majority, at 79. Contrast this assertion about the lack of understanding of threat of pollution, even in the 1960’s, with the facts in this case. For over a decade Boeing trucked hundreds of thousands of 55-gallon drums full of heavy metals and other hazardous wastes to Queen City and dumped them into the sludge pits. In one 3-year period, Boeing discharged nearly 3 million gallons of toxins into the pits. These pits had a total capacity of only 1 million gallons. *118Where did 2 million gallons of hazardous wastes go? The Environmental Protection Agency concluded:
Chemical analyses of the sludge and some of the soil samples [from the ponds] confirm the presence of significant concentrations of heavy metals, chlorinated hydrocarbons, phenolic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, ketones, and aromatic hydrocarbons.
See EPA Order on Consent, Clerk’s Papers (Petitioners) vol. 2, at 471. The EPA identified dangerous levels of at least 43 toxic chemicals in Queen City’s ponds, including arsenic, nickel, PCB’s, benzene, and chloroform, all known carcinogens. Other than digging the three ponds, Queen City’s sole preparation of the site to contain these toxins was to burn the liquid wastes and rely on the tarlike sludge to line the pits.
Even though a reasonable landowner in the same circumstances may know with absolute certainty that toxins will contaminate surrounding groundwater, the trier of fact must, under the majority’s opinion, disregard this proof in favor of credible evidence of the polluter’s self-asserted, subjective ignorance.
In Rodriguez v. Williams, 107 Wn.2d 381, 729 P.2d 627 (1986), we could not accept such an absurd result. The court in Rodriguez adopted a subjective test to decide whether, under defendant Williams’ homeowner policy, Williams intended to harm his 15-year-old stepdaughter when he committed incest. The court assumed Williams had no such subjective intent, but then ruled his actual subjective intent was irrelevant. As a matter of law, the court construed intent to harm based on Williams’ acts. When faced with the obvious consequences of a subjective test, the court created a special exception for incest.
The majority tries to soften Rodriguez. After nearly nine pages of complex, well-written analysis in support of a subjective standard, the majority notes "[o]ne commentator has suggested that the difference between an objective standard and a subjective standard may not be a substantial one”. Majority, at 69. Would this court reverse a jury’s verdict *119because of an insubstantial difference? If the majority opinion means what it says, polluters’ credible evidence of ignorance — they never expected, intended, or foresaw the escape of contaminates — must triumph at trial, even in the face of overwhelming contrary objective evidence of leaching. Proof of the reasonableness of polluters’ subjective belief is, by definition, irrelevant.
Queen City should be responsible for pollution damage it knew, or should have known, resulted from its operations. The definition of "occurrence” merges two elements: knowledge (damage is unexpected) and intent (damage is unintended). Clerk’s Papers (Respondent) vol. 2, at 448, 466, 495, 519 ("accident. . . which unexpectedly and unintentionally results in . . . property damage”). Because of the critical need to require businesses to internalize the cost of pollution, the court should adopt an objective standard of expectation (knew or should have known) or, at a minimum, create an exception to the subjective standard for polluting events which the insured could reasonably foresee. See Jacquelyn A. Beatty, Exclusions Exclude: Let the Pollution Mean What It Says, 28 Gonz. L. Rev. 401, 421 (1992-1993) ("polluters are best positioned to be aware of and to mitigate the extent of gradual contaminant release”).
I agree with Justice Utter that the majority has inappropriately taken the issues of misrepresentation away from the jury. The majority with this opinion may well interpret the qualified pollution exclusion to extinction. The net result, however, will be to end any hope of affordable insurance coverage for pollution that actually is sudden and accidental.
I would affirm the jury’s determination that Queen City expected or intended material from the waste ponds would leak into the groundwater and that insurance coverage was excluded.
Durham and Madsen, JJ., concur with Guy, J.
*120[Dissent amended by order of the Supreme Court September 29, 1994.]

An equally plausible assumption, endorsed at times by the majority, is that the toxic wastes would discharge, disperse, release or escape from containment, but because of natural filtration would not cause damage when they reached the groundwater. Phrased this way, the average purchaser only failed to foresee damage from hazardous wastes, not their migration from containment.