InsuranceJournal.com
A Georgia couple was awarded $135.5 million for damages to their property by a Tennessee-based solar company and its contractor. According to the lawsuit 1,000 acres of timberland, farmland, and land were mass graded by IEA near the Harris couple. The land was previously used for recreational hunting and fishing and the grading was done without adequate measures for erosion and sediment control.
According to James E. Butler, the attorney for Shaun and Amie Harris, “when it rained, pollution poured downhill and downstream onto the neighbors’ property, inundating wetlands with silt and sediment, and turning a 21-acre trophy fishing lake into a mud hole.”
The Jury returned a verdict of $10.5 million for compensatory damages. The punitive phase, where jurors consider an amount that would punish the companies for their actions, the panel found that SRC, IEA and and an IEA subsidiary — IEA Constructors, LLC — acted with specific intent to cause harm. The jury imposed $25 million in punitive damages against SRC, $50 million against IEA Inc., and $50 million against IEA Constructors