Waste workers who serviced California vineyards owned by Democrats Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Gov. Gavin Newsom are seeking $300 million in compensation from a Napa Valley landfill, claiming they were exposed to toxic chemicals when they had to work during and after the 2020 Glass wildfire.
A group of 15 workers from Upper Valley Disposal Services filed a complaint with California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health against the company and the Clover Flat Landfill.
The group said they were exposed to methane, a highly explosive gas that can cause suffocation, and contaminated water leaking from the Clover Flat Landfill during the fire that broke out in September 2020, Fox News Business reported Thursday.
The workers also claim they faced retaliation and racial discrimination for their allegations against the landfill's potential to pollute water and air in the country's best-known wine region — where Pelosi and Newsom have vineyards.
"We didn't have experience at all with these situations," Jose Garibay Jr., among the group of workers that filed the complaint, told Fox News Business. "We didn't have protocol for what happens in a fire, what happens in an emergency. We had no training whatsoever. But they did send us right after the fire to clean up the mess before officials showed up."
Garibay said he and a 15-man crew worked 11- to 12-hour days, had no training on the handling of hazardous material cleanup and no equipment other than N95 masks.
Officials from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health told Fox News Business complaints are confidential, but documents can be shared once a case is closed.
In a consumer complaint in September, Geoff Ellsworth, the Democrat mayor of St. Helena, California, where Pelosi has a vineyard, accused the landfill's operators of "negligence and reckless endangerment toward public health and safety ... related to significant and unnecessary fire and wildfire risk" at the dump.
"There's a machine politic thing going on here — this is the backyard of San Francisco, and people have their second homes and their wine businesses," Ellsworth, a longtime critic of the local landfill, told Fox News Business. "But it doesn't absolve them from taking responsibility for the laws in the area and the treatment of the people working here."
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