The families of two workers killed when a wall collapsed at the Gatlinburg, Tenn., Wastewater Treatment Plant last year claim the city and its construction and engineering firms knew of construction problems in 1997 but did not act to stabilize the wall.
In a pair of similarly-worded lawsuits filed Feb. 27 in Circuit Court in Sevierville, Tenn., the families of John Eslinger, 53, and Don Storey, 44, claim that failure to act resulted in the workers’ deaths April 5, 2011, when the east wall of the stabilization basin fell onto the flow control room, trapping the two men and spilling about 1 million gal of untreated sewage into the Little Pigeon River. Each family is asking $17 million in damages.