New Jersey Federal Court Denies Request For Class Certification In Train Derailment Case
The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey denied a request for class certification for individuals and business who suffered economic losses as a result of a train derailment that resulted in the release of toxic chemicals. The plaintiffs in the case moved to certify two putative economic loss classes: (1) individuals who resided within the evacuation zone and had incurred unreimbursed non-medical expenses as a result of the derailment; and (2) individuals and businesses residing in a set geographic area who incurred income losses as a result of the derailment (with individuals specifically incurring income loss as a result of sheltering in place).
The court denied class certification for both proposed classes. With respect to the first class, the court found that the class could not be certified because it failed to satisfy Rule 23(b)’s numerosity requirement. In particular, the court found that hundreds of individuals who would have been included in the potential class had already settled with the defendants, reducing the size of the proposed class significantly. As to the remaining potential members, the court concluded that the plaintiffs did not provide sufficient evidence to show how many potential members were likely to meet the class criteria and, therefore, that the class was too speculative to be certified.
With respect to the second proposed class, the court also concluded that it failed the numerosity requirement, finding that the plaintiffs’ evidence of class size was speculative. Specifically, the court found that the plaintiffs defined the class based on a larger group, of which an unknown number of members would admittedly not be members of the class. The court also found that while the individuals included in the second proposed class met the commonality prong, the businesses needed to prove income loss, and there was no uniform or reliable method for calculating such damages.
In addition to the Rule 23(b) requirements, the court also concluded that while both classes of individuals formed an ascertainable class due to the well-defined geographical boundaries of the groups and the fact that the inquiry into their losses was objective, the businesses included in the second proposed class were not ascertainable because the plaintiffs failed to offer an administratively feasible method for determining which businesses should be included as class members, noting that physical location alone would not be sufficient in this case because the court could not assume that each business within the defined geographic location had suffered a loss of income.
