VICTIMS OF STAFFORD SLIDE SETTLE THEIR LAWSUIT

The Stafford landslide lawsuit jury trial that was set to begin today has been settled. The terms of the settlement were read into the Court\'s record earlier this morning. As part of the settlement Maxxam and its wholly owned subsidiary Pacific Lumber Company along Barnum Timber agreed to pay the 26 residents of Stafford $3,300,000.00 (three million three hundred thousand dollars) in order to avoid the jury trial. Many of the residents of Stafford were current or former employees of Pacific Lumber and virtually all were long-time supporters of the timber industry.

The case arose out of a catastrophic landslide that occurred on December 31, 1996 and nearly buried the entire community of Stafford under hundreds of thousand of cubic yards of mud and debris. The landslide, which originated on the steep slopes above Stafford, had been recently clear-cut by Pacific Lumber and was alleged by the residents to have been the cause of the slide. The residents claimed that Pacific Lumber should have known that once they roaded and clear-cut an already unstable hillside, the residents\' homes would be subject to slides.

\"We are pleased that Maxxam and Pacific Lumber have finally come around and compensated us for the harms to our property and lives their logging practices caused. We all have suffered much,\" said long time resident and former PL employee Mary DelBaggio. \"It just makes me kind of mad that they didn\'t do right by us 4 years ago. But I guess they thought they could beat us with all their power and money. It looks like they were wrong. I hope now we can start some real healing,\" she said.

Mike O\'Neal another resident of Stafford agreed. \" If Maxxam/PL and Barnum had offered us half the amount of the settlement four years ago we never would have had to go to court and spend three and half years litigating this thing. I sure hope everyone learns some lessons from this tragedy. No one should ever have to go through what my neighbors and I had to go through. Especially when Pacific Lumber should have known better than to cut the hills the way they did in the first place,\" he said.

As part of the settlement, Maxxam and Pacific Lumber will install lights at the bottom of hill where basin were constructed that supposedly protect the residents of Stafford from the next big slide. The lights are being installed in order help better monitor the steep and still very unstable hills above the remaining homes at Stafford.

\"I\'m pleased that at least we will be better able to see the slide come before it gets here the next time.\" said Kim Rollins a former resident whose home was destroyed and whose grandfather used to be mill superintendent at Pacific Lumber. \"But,\" he added, \"I don\'t think my family and I are going to move back any time soon. I want to wait and see how Pacific Lumber puts the lessons that they learned from this case into practice. Then maybe there will be no more Staffords and we can be comfortable enough to move back.\"

Steven Schectman, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs said he was pleased with the outcome. \"This was an extremely difficult case. Not so much because of the facts or the law,\" he said. \"It was more because we were up against a Fortune 500 multi-national corporation who had unlimited resources. They attempted to use the fact that they have been one the largest private employers in Humboldt county for the past 100 years as a shield to protect them from any allegations of wrongdoing. If that wasn\'t enough,\" Schectman added, \"we also had to go all the way to the California Supreme Court to have Judge Feeney removed from hearing this case because of his bias in favor of his former client, Pacific Lumber. Still we were able to persevere and in the end achieved a result that should make our clients\' lives better and the rest of us that much smarter. For that we are grateful.\"

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