Highlighting an area of unsettled law in North Carolina toxic tort litigation, a federal district court in the Eleventh Circuit held that the pre-2014 North Carolina statute of repose contained no exception for latent disease, barring disease-based toxic tort suits ten years after they accrue. Specifically, the U.S. District Court in Georgia held that North Carolina's ten-year statute of repose barred the claims of U.S. Marine Corps service members and their families in a multidistrict litigation (MDL) based on personal injury allegedly resulting from exposure to contaminated drinking water. See In re: Camp Lejeune North Carolina Water Contamination Litigation, No. 1:11-MD-2218, 2016 WL 7049038 (N.D. Ga. Dec. 5, 2016).
Plaintiffs alleged across multiple (now consolidated) cases that while on base at Camp Lejeune, they were exposed through the base’s drinking water to benzene, trichloroethylene (TCE), tetrachloroethylene (PCE), dichloroethene (DCE), and vinyl chloride through contaminated wells as late as 1987, eventually resulting in illness and death. The government contended that because the earliest suit was filed in 1999, more than ten years after the last government act alleged to cause illness, it was barred by the North Carolina statute of repose. Plaintiffs responded that the statute of repose contains an exemption for latent disease. The Northern District of Georgia, the federal court that oversees the MDL, applied an Eleventh Circuit interpretation of North Carolina’s ten-year statute of repose, which held that the North Carolina statute in effect at the time...
