Body bag maker sues NY over September 11 order

A New Jersey plastic bag company has sued New York City for refusing to pay for 100,000 body bags it had ordered after the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centre.

Fordion Packaging of Hackensack, which filed suit in Manhattan federal court, is seeking payment of $US203,388 ($310,420) plus interest.

The suit said the company had received a written order on September 13, 2001, from the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and signed by its director of purchasing.

Fordion said it had to put other clients' business on hold to meet the order and had produced the bags within seven days.

However, the city later told Fordion that it had only used a small portion of the bags and wanted to return the balance.



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The company refused, saying the bags were not returnable because they were specially produced items.

"Defendant then belatedly attempted to reject the bags on the erroneous basis that they were not suitable for their intended purpose," the suit said.

Fordion said that, since some of the bags were used, they were acceptable by the city.

"The true reason the city belatedly attempted to reject the body bags was that there were far fewer bodies recovered from the World Trade Centre disaster site than the City had anticipated when it placed the order," the suit said.

The death toll from the attack on the World Trade Centre was 2795.

Maybe they hand sorted the bags, picked out the 2795 good ones which met their standards and wanted to return the rest :bloated:

Like hell, this is just a blatant example of how the city council tries to bully the businesses and how nicely it can backfire.
I hope Fordion win the lawsuit!

thats just plain stupidity......why would the city order so many then not be able to use that much and then try to return them on an erroneous basis......jackassees:eek7:

Whoah!! I feel ill :bloated:

why don't they store them then?

Its their own fault they ordered that many. They can't really expect to return like the bulk of them cuz the company that made them would have to store them etc.

I hope the business wins the lawsuit and NY stores the bags away. Should be enough to last several decades.

For the cost of the lawsuit,NY would be better off taking the hit for their error and onselling the bags at a loss.There must be a market for them somewhere.No company can run up 100,000 items from scratch at that sort of notice,the company must have had patterns and materials in stock for other clients.

Originally posted by taranaki
For the cost of the lawsuit,NY would be better off taking the hit for their error and onselling the bags at a loss.There must be a market for them somewhere.No company can run up 100,000 items from scratch at that sort of notice,the company must have had patterns and materials in stock for other clients.

Generally not for that type of volume order though Naki, so the company would have had to order material in on short notice (believe it or not, 90% of the material for this kind of thing is from Europe) at additional cost as well as it is likely their is the additional cost of overtime and other overheads.

For the company to accept the return it would cost them more than it would cost the city to keep them.

Originally posted by YogsVR4
I hope the business wins the lawsuit and NY stores the bags away. Should be enough to last several decades.


In New York???? More like 5 minutes :bloated:


But 20,000 people worked in the towers if I am correct- so why would you order 100,000 body bags????? I mean it's unlikely that 80,000 firemen/cops/paramedics responded to the 9/11