William Shives is 92 and his wife, Barbara, is 84. For more than 40 years they lived on 24 acres along Blythewood Road in Richland County, S.C., next to land that is now the 1,100-acre site of Scout Motors’ $2 billion assembly plant. On Aug. 7 they sued Scout and Richland County, saying the plant’s construction drove them out of the house. On Oct. 2, Scout answered that if anyone damaged their property, it was the contractors.
In that filing, Scout pulled three companies into the case as third-party defendants: Evans General Contractors, Elevate Drilling & Blasting and a firm the filing lists as Strack, the Post and Courier reported. The paper quoted the filing directly: “The damages alleged by Plaintiffs, if any, were due solely to the actions of the Third-Party Defendants and were not caused by any act or omission on the part of Defendant.”…