Even as its onetime CEO fights a renewed extradition attempt over one of the worst environmental disasters in history, a onetime owner of Union Carbide Corp.”™s Danbury headquarters has sued the company on claims the property produced its own small share of pollution.
Union Carbide Corp. was sued in federal court this month by the company that bought its onetime Danbury headquarters building at 39 Old Ridgebury Road, which claims Union Carbide should be responsible for paying the cleanup costs for pollution allegedly escaping the building into the ground.
Now called Danbury Corporate Center and the largest office building in Fairfield County, the building was changed hands twice in the last three years, with Grubb & Ellis buying the building in 2007 and flipping it for $72 million this year to New York-based Matrix Realty Group Inc.
Long before, an entity calling itself Danbury Buildings Inc. bought the 1.3-million-square-foot facility in 1987, just as Union Carbide was swamped with woes from a 1984 chemical release at one of its plants in Bhopal, India that killed 3,800 people, with thousands more dying of subsequent ailments attributed to the incident which it blamed on sabotage.
In late July, authorities in India issued a fresh warrant for the arrest of former Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson, who reportedly still has a home in Connecticut. Anderson was arrested in 1984 after traveling to Bhopal, but was released on bail and has not returned to India since. The United States and India do not have an extradition treaty.
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In 2001, Dow Chemical Co. acquired Union Carbide for $10 billion, a decade after Union Carbide spun off an industrial gases division as Praxair Inc., which remains based in Danbury.
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The Union Carbide name continues at Dow today, with the subsidiary now based in Houston. And Union Carbide continues to keep its attorneys busy ”“ some 4,800 federal cases have been filed so far this year against entities bearing the Union Carbide name, many of them related cases filed in multiple jurisdictions.
The Danbury Buildings case is the lone complaint this year against Union Carbide Corp. in the federal courts of its former home state and the first since 2004 that is directed against Union Carbide specifically rather than roping the company in as part of a larger group of industrial defendants.
In 2004, Praxair and its pension plan sued Union Carbide and Dow on claims it was owed proceeds from Prudential annuities it held, as Prudential converted from mutual ownership to a public company with shares of stock. U.S. District Court Judge Stefan Underhill dismissed that case in 2008.
Underhill is also hearing the Danbury Buildings (DBI) case, in which the plaintiff says Union Carbide agreed to indemnify the buyer for any environmental liability the buildings may have that would trigger a claim. The plaintiff said that process was indeed triggered in the 2007 sale of the building to Grubb & Ellis, after unspecified soil and groundwater contamination turned up in inspections that were performed in accordance with the Connecticut Transfer Act.
DBI also hopes to hold Union Carbide liable for contamination it says became apparent in the 2008 sale of 55 Old Ridgebury Road in Danbury.
DBI says it has paid more than $600,000 to date for remediation work to comply with an order from the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.
“Union Carbide has received and is investigating this claim, but we believe it has no merit,” said Tomm Sprick, a Union Carbide spokesman.
