Court overturns $85 million award for Oregon soldiers who say oil field in Iraq sickened them

PORTLAND, Ore. – The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned an $85 million jury award to Oregon soldiers who said they were sickened from guarding an oil field water plant during the Iraq War.

The military contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root successfully argued that Oregon was not the proper jurisdiction for the case.

In 2012, a federal jury in Portland found KBR guilty of negligence. The soldiers say they have respiratory ailments after their exposure to sodium dichromate, and they fear that a carcinogen the toxin contains could cause cancer later in life.