220,000 Gallons of Chicken Rendering Waste Went Into the River That Supplies the County's Drinking Water. The Boat Repairman Who Worked In It Developed a Flesh Eating Infection.
After trial: This verdict is recent and its appellate fate is open. The jury returned $70 million on March 27, 2026 in Walker County Circuit Court after a four-week trial, on wantonness against Tyson Farms and negligence against HydraService. Tyson Foods said publicly that it respects the decision but is disappointed and that the evidence showed the incident did not cause Griffin's injuries; it did not rule out an appeal, and as of our last check nothing had been filed. Treat the figure as a jury verdict, not as money received. On Alabama's caps: the punitive damages limits in Ala. Code § 6-11-21 are the ones that would ordinarily matter at this scale, and the statute's own terms exclude actions for physical injury and wrongful death from those limits, so a bodily-injury verdict of this size is not cut by that section. Alabama caps nothing else applicable here and no public entity was a defendant. What we have not been able to establish from the available reporting is how the $70 million divides between compensatory and punitive damages, or how it is apportioned between the two defendants; if a punitive component were ever held subject to a limit, that split would matter, and we note the gap rather than assume the answer.
Won by Nelson, Bryan, Boylen & Cross.
In 2019 a rented temporary pipe system failed at a Tyson Farms chicken rendering plant in Hanceville, and roughly 220,000 gallons of rendering wastewater went into the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River. Mark Griffin, a boat repairman working on the water downriver in Dora, fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis.
What happened
In June 2019 a temporary pipe system at the Tyson Farms rendering facility in Hanceville, Alabama failed. The pipe had been rented from HydraService, Inc., which also maintained it.
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management put the volume that escaped at roughly 220,000 gallons of chicken rendering wastewater: heads, beaks, blood, bones, intestines. It went into the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River.
The Mulberry Fork is not an incidental waterway. It flows into the Black Warrior and is the primary source of drinking water for much of Walker County, drawn and processed at the Laye-Williams Water Treatment Plant. Fish died in numbers.
Mark Griffin, of Dora, was a boat repairman. His work put him in and around that water. He began feeling ill shortly after the spill, and after rounds of treatment and testing his doctors diagnosed necrotizing fasciitis, the soft-tissue infection usually described in plain language as flesh-eating bacteria.
He filed suit in 2020 against Tyson Farms and HydraService. The case took nearly six years and ended in a four-week trial with testimony from more than a dozen witnesses. Court records document the surgical and medical treatment he went through across those years, and one of his lawyers told WBRC that Griffin still lives with a bone infection and an open wound.
On March 27, 2026, the Walker County jury found for him on two different theories against two different defendants: wantonness against Tyson Farms, and negligence against HydraService. It awarded $70 million.
The verdict is the largest in Walker County's history. The record it broke was $10 million, set in a 2017 medical malpractice case tried by the same two firms.
One piece of context the jury did not need but a reader should have: the 2019 spill was the fourth at the Hanceville facility since 2011. An earlier round led to a $3 million settlement with the State of Alabama that required the company to take steps against a recurrence.
Tyson Foods, which owns Tyson Farms, said it respects the jury's decision and is disappointed in the outcome, that the evidence at trial showed the June 2019 incident did not cause Griffin's injuries, and that it extends sympathy to him for the injuries he sustained. It noted that it acquired the Hanceville facility in August 2018 and has since installed permanent underground piping and air scrubbers there.
Griffin was represented by Josh Vick and Dennis Goldasich, then of Goldasich, Vick and Fulk and now Goldasich, Vick and McCartney, with Bob Bryan and Clay Boylen of Nelson, Bryan, Boylen and Cross in Jasper as co-counsel.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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