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Ford and The Environmental Quality Company Named Defendants in Class Action Suit

26 March 1998

J.D. Peters Announces Ford Motor Company and The Environmental Quality Company Named Defendants in an Environmental Class Action Suit

    DETROIT, March 26 -- On March 23, 1998, the Ann Arbor law
firm of Donnelly W. Hadden, P.C. and the Detroit law firm of Charfoos &
Christensen, P.C. filed a class action law suit in the Wayne County Circuit
Court on behalf of approximately 500 Van Buren Township families and residents
who have been subjected to years of noxious odors from the waste treatment
plant on the property of defendant, Ford Motor Company and operated
by defendant, The Environmental Quality Company.
    The defendants' operation of the waste treatment plant has been in
constant violation of smokestack emission regulations, especially noxious
odors, from 1990 when it first began operating in Van Buren Township.  In
spite of hundreds of citizen complaints and in spite of repeated failures to
pass the smokestack noxious emission tests, Ford Motor Company and its tenant,
The Environmental Quality Company, continue to be bad and smelly neighbors to
the residents of Van Buren Township.
    Because of the numbers of people affected and because the individual
claims will probably not exceed $20,000 in each individual case, the citizens
from Van Buren Township have joined together as a class to seek compensatory
damages, exemplary damages, and hopefully, the clean up of this nuisance
generating operation.

SOURCE  Charfoos & Christensen, P.C.