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Illinois environmental case to take place at City Hall

Joanne Branham, a restaurant night manager near Apache Junction, Ariz., flew into Philadelphia last week. She's not here to tour the Constitution Center or shop in Manayunk.

Joanne Branham, a restaurant night manager near Apache Junction, Ariz., flew into Philadelphia last week. She's not here to tour the Constitution Center or shop in Manayunk.

Taking a hotel room near City Hall, Branham is a plaintiff in a complex and high-stakes environmental lawsuit that will play out in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court over the next two to three months. The trial starts Monday at 9:30 a.m. before Judge Allan L. Tereshko.

Branham's husband, Frank, a former factory and construction worker, died of a glioblastoma brain tumor in 2004. He was 63 and had been a longtime resident of McCollum Lake Village in Illinois. The lawsuit claims that massive contamination oozing into the groundwater from a Morton International Inc. chemical plant about a mile from his home caused his cancer.

The defendant is Rohm & Haas Co., the former Philadelphia-based owner of the Morton plant. Rohm & Haas is now owned by Dow Chemical Co.

The Branham case is the first of 31 related cases from picturesque McCollum Lake, in McHenry County, winding their way through the Philadelphia court system.

Branham's attorney, Aaron Freiwald, says it's one of the largest brain-cancer-cluster litigations to reach trial yet. The Branham outcome could set the stage for the related McCollum Lake cases.

Jurors were selected Wednesday, and on Thursday Tereshko issued an order cautioning both sides against speaking to reporters outside the courtroom, or maintaining websites that could prejudice the case.

"I don't want to discuss the case substantively now that the trial has started, but after five years of preparation, obviously we're ready to go," Freiwald said late last week.

In a statement Friday, Rohm & Haas said: "The judge in this case has instructed both sides in this case not to make comments to the media that could unduly influence the jury. Rohm & Haas respects the judge's order and we look forward to presenting our case in court."

Along with the past environmental practice of an Illinois chemical factory, science, the safety of the common plastic called vinyl chloride, and the concept of a cancer cluster will be part of the trial in Room 243 in City Hall.

How the McCollum Lake brain-cancer and tumor-cluster cases came to trial in Philadelphia is an interesting part of the story.

Rohm & Haas purchased Morton International in the late 1990s for several billion dollars. One of Morton's plants was a plastics factory in Ringwood, Ill.

It was that plant, according to plaintiff claims, that dumped toxic chemicals into an unlined retention pond between the early 1960s and late 1970s. The chemicals traveled to nearby McCollum Lake through a shallow aquifer and a deepwater aquifer, the plaintiffs claim.

Dow Chemical, of Midland, Mich., bought Rohm & Haas for about $16 billion in 2009 and assumed the environmental liabilities associated with the Illinois factory.

Rohm & Haas has retained the high-powered law firm Kirkland & Ellis L.L.P., of Chicago, to defend the Branham case. The defense likely will focus on the fact that there were malignant brain cancers and benign brain tumors among the victims. One victim has a liver disease.

"There is no cluster in McCullom Lake Village," lawyer Kevin Van Wart of Kirkland & Ellis was quoted saying in a CNN article. "If you draw circles around selected cases, you can always draw the conclusion of something unusual."

According to Rohm's official position statement on a website: "Based on all available data, as well as local, state and federal public health reviews, no scientific evidence has indicated that operations at the Ringwood, Ill., facility pose any past or present threat to public health in the community or neighboring communities, including McCollum Lake Village."

The website was available Thursday morning. After the Philadelphia judge's order that day, the site was blocked Friday.