Court Opinion

ID: 9729035
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 14:25:05.237475+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:20:53.131228
License: Public Domain

MICHAEL A. WOLFF, Chief Justice,
dissenting.
The City of St. Louis can prove that multiple paint manufacturers sold lead-based paint in the city. The lead in the paint in buildings throughout the city is a poisonous nuisance that is a threat to public health and needs to be cleaned up. The city, however, cannot prove which lead-poisoned buildings have Benjamin Moore paints, which buildings have Sherwin-Williams paints, and so forth.
This is not a personal injury case. It is a nuisance case. The answer to the question in this case, as in many cases, depends on which legal theory is used. Because there are alleged to be multiple wrongdoers, the principal opinion applies this Court’s legal theory in Zafft v. Eli Lilly & Company, 676 S.W.2d 241 (Mo. banc 1984), which rejected the idea of market share liability in a products liability personal injury case involving multiple alleged wrongdoers.
The Zaffi decision rejects the market share liability that was adopted by the Supreme Court of California in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories, 26 Cal.3d 588, 163 Cal.Rptr. 132, 607 P.2d 924 (1980). That case apportioned responsibility to individual victims of the DES drug, which was taken by their mothers, according to each producer’s market share of the drug during the relevant period. This is an extension of Summers v. Tice, 33 Cal.2d 80, 199 P.2d 1 (1948), a case in which two hunters negligently fired in the direction of a plaintiff: the plaintiff was unable to determine which of the two shots injured him, since he was only hit by one shot. The California court allowed recovery under an alternative liability theory that shifted the burden to both wrongdoers to prove that each was not responsible for the injury to the plaintiff. Since neither could prove that his shot did not do the injury, both shooters were jointly and severally liable. In Sindell this theory was expanded to allocate responsibility for an individual injury according to a manufacturer’s market share, without regard to whether a particular manufacturer was in fact the source of the injury-causing doses of the drug.
Whether one accepts the Sindell legal theory, the whole Summers-Sindell-Zafft theory is irrelevant to the issue before the Court today because there is no injured person for whom it is necessary to determine which wrongdoer caused the particular personal injury. All of the companies that sold lead-based paint in the city of St. Louis contributed to the problem, which is not an individual injury — for which the wrongdoer must be identified — but rather is a poisonous hazard to which many may have contributed.
Let me suggest a more applicable analogy. Assume that a city draws drinking water from a stream into which ten defendants pour toxic sludge. The purpose of a nuisance lawsuit would be to require the polluters to clean up the sludge.1 The *118point of the lawsuit would not be to provide a remedy to an individual who claims to have been injured by the toxic sludge. See State ex rel. Wear v. Springfield Gas & Electric Co., 204 S.W. 942, 945 (Mo.App.1918) (“if the facts... amount to a public nuisance, both as to the destruction of the fish and the pollution of the waters, so as to be injurious to the health and comfort of the public generally ...,” then the prosecuting attorney can maintain a public nuisance action.) It is unimportant to identify an injury and link it to the harm that has been inflicted. It is important simply to identify the sources of the toxic sludge — indisputably a health hazard as in this case — and make the sources pay to clean it up.2
The lead-based paint that was applied to walls throughout the city of St. Louis is akin to the sludge in this hypothetical. The lead-based paint is a hazard to human health. When lead-based paint chips, flakes, or crumbles to dust, the lead can be ingested by young children, whose brains can be substantially injured, depending on the amount.3 Treatment may reduce symptoms, and in extreme cases save the child’s life, but treatment does not undo brain injury. Rogan, W., et al., The Effect of Chelation Therapy with Succimer on Neuropsychological Development in Children Exposed to Lead, 344 The New England Journal of Medicine, 1421-1426 (2001).
There is no question that the city has an obligation to its citizens to remove, or to cause the removal, of this public health hazard. The city of St. Louis has been more or less engaged in this vital effort, with intermittent bursts of attention, for many years. Norm Parish, Mayor Harmon Crafts Plan to Reduce Lead Poisoning in Homes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 20, 1999; Marianna Riley, St. Louis Still Can’t Reduce Lead Poisoning in Children: Critics Say Lack of Coordinated Effort by Agencies has Hindered the City’s Lead Abatement Program, St. Louis Posi>-Dispatch, Aug. 21, 2003.
In many cities, including St. Louis, the issue is an economic one. The remediation of lead-based paint is expensive. It is an expense imposed upon older cities though it is a problem that these cities did not create. But no city can afford to continue having the brains of many of its children permanently dulled by lead poisoning.
*119In the same way that it is appropriate to make polluters contribute to the cost of the cleanup of their sludge, it seems appropriate to make the manufacturers of lead-based paint help pay for the cost of remediating the poison they have helped distribute throughout the city.
If this Court treats public nuisance cases as the principal opinion does here, “the concept of public nuisance would have no distinction from the theories underlying class action litigation, which serves to provide individual remedies for similar harms to large numbers of identifiable individuals.” City of Milwaukee v. NL Industries, Inc., 278 Wis.2d 313, 691 N.W.2d 888, 893 (App.2004). This is because an entire city — not just one sick child — has suffered and sustained an injury. Id. This injury “is community-wide and affects even those whose health is not compromised by lead-paint poisoning,” and “the [c]ity is also the entity most reasonably able to remedy this community-wide injury to public health.” Id.
This public nuisance case has nothing to do with identifying a particular paint and linking it to a particular injured victim. It has everything to do with identifying the sources of a poison and making those sources pay their fair share of the cost of the cleanup of a direct hazard to the public health.4
I respectfully dissent.

. (1) A public nuisance is an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public. (2) Circumstances that may sustain a holding that an interference with a public right is unreasonable include the following: (a) whether the conduct involves a significant interference with the public health, the public safety, the public peace, the public *118comfort or the public convenience, or (b) whether the conduct is proscribed by a statute, ordinance or administrative regulation, or (c) whether the conduct is of a continuing nature or has produced a permanent or long-lasting effect, and, as the actor knows or has reason to know, has a significant effect upon the public right. Restatement (Second) of Torts sections 821B(1) and (2).

. In the current era, nuisance prevention and remediation from pollution is accomplished through various federal and state statutes. See, e.g., The Clean Water Act, 33 U.S.C.A. sections 1251 et seq. (1981) (amended in 1987), regulating the discharge of pollutants into the waters of the United States, and the prevention of and response to accidental releases and spills of oil and hazardous substances to waters of the United States, and the Missouri Clean Water Law, sections 644.006 et seq., and the corresponding rules established by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. These statutes and rules have not replaced common law nuisance actions. See State ex rel. Dresser Industries, Inc. v. Ruddy, 592 S.W.2d 789, 792 (Mo. banc 1980), which holds that the Clean Water Law did not preempt public nuisance claims.

. Adults, of the urban-pioneering rehabbing variety, also suffer lead poisoning by inhalation when burning, sanding, or scraping lead-based paint from the walls of old buildings that they are rehabbing. Adult brains may not be as profoundly affected by exposure to lead, but they may show signs of neurological injury.

. The city also appeals a 2004 trial court order in which the trial court denied defendants’ previous motion for summary judgment based on the statute of limitations. The defendants argued that the city’s claim was for permanent nuisance which has a five-year statute of limitations. The trial court disagreed, finding that the city’s claim was for temporary nuisance, which has a ten-year statute of limitations. The city only appeals the trial court's determination that because the city is suing for a temporary nuisance, it is not allowed to recover future damages. In this appeal, defendants have suggested that this Court find, as an alternative ground, that the city’s actual claim is for permanent nuisance and, consequently, is barred by the five-year statute of limitations.
Whether a nuisance is temporary or permanent is a question of law for the court, not a question of fact for the jury. Campbell v. Anderson, 866 S.W.2d 139, 143 (Mo.App. 1993). “Whether a particular nuisance is 'permanent' or 'temporary, continuing or abatable’ is one of the most baffling areas of the law,” Judge Simeone observed in Spain v. City of Cape Girardeau, 484 S.W.2d 498, 503 (Mo.App.1972). A nuisance is temporary if it is reasonably and practically abatable. Frank v. Environmental Sanitation Management, Inc., 687 S.W.2d 876, 883 (Mo. banc 1985). This lawsuit seeks compensation for the costs of abating, or removing, lead-based paint in city residences. The trial judge correctly determined that the lead-based paint is abatable and not subject to the five-year statute of limitations. That said, however, the statute of limitations defense — even under the longer period — may still be open to defendants as a factual issue if this case were remanded.