The water tower in Sanborn, Iowa, is now the focus of a lawsuit alleging $4 million in damages caused by contaminated water. (Photo courtesy of the City of Sanborn)
A lawsuit over millions of dollars in damages allegedly caused by water contamination in the city of Sanborn has escalated with a new defendant added to the case.
The Minnesota dairy cooperative Associated Milk Producers Inc., or AMPI, is suing the City of Sanborn in federal court, as well as the company the city hired to clean its municipal water tower, Maguire Iron of South Dakota.
AMPI operates an 80-year-old plant in Sanborn where each day, it produces 280,000 pounds of cheese. As part of the production process, the plant consumes 300,000 gallons of water each day.
In late 2021, the city hired Maguire Iron to clean, maintain and sandblast the municipal water tower. In the summer of 2022, the lawsuit claims, Maguire negligently performed its sandblasting of the tower’s interior by using jagged shards of a toxic black sandblasting aggregate commonly called black magic. An alleged failure to seal the intake and outflow pipes that route water in and out of the tower resulted in “sandblasting aggregate and other spent cleaning debris entering the city’s water system and subsequently infiltrating the Sanborn plant,” the lawsuit claims.
When Maguire finished its work, city officials attempted to refill the tower and noticed sandblasting aggregate flowing out of a valve connected to the tower. City workers then spent several hours attempting to flush the aggregate out of the pipes and then resumed their efforts to refill the tower, the lawsuit alleges.
Within days, officials at the AMPI plant allegedly discovered large amounts of sandblasting aggregate in its water, its equipment and in the cheese that had recently been processed. The lawsuit claims the amount of contamination was so significant that the aggregate from within the tower had “blasted AMPI’s filters off,” leaving piles of black aggregate forming on the plant’s floor.
As a result of the incident, AMPI alleges, it had to discard “cheese worth nearly $4 million that had been contaminated and was unsafe for consumption.”
In its lawsuit, AMPI argues the city “negligently performed its role in the maintenance and repair services on the water tower,” alleging it failed to hire a third-party inspector to monitor Maguire’s work on the water tower.
“The city should have notified Maguire, or hired a third-party, to ensure the city’s water supply was free of dangerous sandblasting aggregate and spent cleaning debris before providing such contaminated water to the city’s water users,” AMPI alleges.
Defendants blame each other
In response to the allegations, the city is arguing in court that while its employees noticed the foreign material in the water system, it flushed all of the contaminated water out of the system “until water came out that did not have the foreign material in it.”
The city also argues that AMPI is to blame for its own damages in the cheese production facility and that “its fault was more than any fault” that might be attributed to the other parties involved.
In its defense, Maguire is arguing any damages suffered by AMPI are the “the fault of another party or entity.”
The case took another turn recently when Maguire filed its own lawsuit against an Oklahoma company called LBM Coatings, which Maguire had hired as a subcontractor to handle maintenance on the water tower.
Maguire alleges LBM is required to defend and hold harmless Maguire for any damages in the case. LBM disputes that and alleges the damages claimed by the milk producers are “the result of the conduct of others.”
With regard to any contaminated water that may have flowed to other city businesses and to residents’ homes, Mayor Randy Lyman has said that while the city didn’t test residents’ water for the presence of black aggregate, it did perform other types of testing that indicated the water was safe.
Asked why the supply wasn’t tested for the presence of the sandblasting aggregate, Lyman said, “We had no complaints from residents about any aggregate in the water.”