If Wilbur Earl Tennant’s cows hadn’t died from a mysterious losing illness through the Nineties, the world might need by no means discovered concerning the secret historical past of poisonous eternally chemical compounds.
Tennant was a West Virginia farmer whose household owned land close to a DuPont manufacturing unit on the Ohio River the place the chemical large made one among its signature innovations: Teflon nonstick and anti-stain coatings utilized in carpets, clothes, cookware and a whole lot of different merchandise.
The Tennants had bought a few of their property to DuPont years earlier. Firm officers advised one among Tennant’s brothers in particular person and in writing they deliberate to show it right into a landfill for workplace rubbish — nothing hazardous.
Just a few years after the sale, Tennant suspected DuPont had crammed the landfill with extra than simply rubbish.
Foam started showing in a creek that meandered previous the landfill earlier than spilling into the Tennants’ pasture, he later testified in a courtroom submitting. Cows that drank from the creek had been wholesome. Dozens started dramatically shedding pounds, dying even after Tennant doubled their feed on the recommendation of veterinarians who couldn’t decide what was killing the animals.
A videotape Tennant shot with a VHS camcorder exhibits emaciated cows with tumors on their hides. He focuses on the froth-covered creek earlier than the tape cuts to a dissected calf with blackened enamel and oddly coloured organs.
“There’s something improper with this water,” Tennant says on the videotape.
Legal professionals in Parkersburg, West Virginia, turned him down when he urged them to sue DuPont, then one of many space’s largest employers. However pals knew the grandson of one among their neighbors had develop into an environmental lawyer in Cincinnati. Name him, they instructed.
On paper, Rob Bilott didn’t seem like a type of crusading legal professionals in authorized thrillers. (He later can be performed by actor Mark Ruffalo within the 2019 movie “Darkish Waters.”)
Bilott’s legislation agency, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, sometimes represents company shoppers like DuPont in environmental instances, not individuals like Tennant. “In brief, I used to be enjoying for the alternative workforce,” Bilott recalled in his memoir concerning the lawsuit he ended up submitting in opposition to DuPont — and the explosive aftermath.
Throughout the years earlier than DuPont settled the lawsuit — paying the Tennants an undisclosed quantity with out assigning blame for the lifeless cows — the corporate despatched Bilott bins of paperwork he requested via the traditional courtroom course of.
Nothing jumped out in web page after web page he reviewed, Bilott recalled. However a single letter, despatched by a DuPont scientist to the U.S. Environmental Safety Company, started unraveling a extra alarming story.
The June 23, 2000, letter listed one thing within the landfill that didn’t seem within the different paperwork or in Taft’s chemical dictionaries. Nor was it on the checklist of gear regulated by the EPA. Bilott later decided it was one of many eternally chemical compounds — perfluorooctanoic acid, generally referred to right now as PFOA.
DuPont gave the impression to be involved sufficient about PFOA that the corporate examined workers on the Teflon plant and located the chemical of their blood, the letter to the EPA revealed.
Revelations by one other chemical firm gave Bilott leverage to return into courtroom and request extra data from DuPont.
A month earlier than DuPont’s letter about PFOA, the Minnesota-based conglomerate 3M introduced it will cease making a chemical with the same sounding identify: perfluorooctane sulfonic acid or PFOS. For many years it had been the spine of 3M’s Scotchgard model of stain-resistant merchandise.
It turned out 3M additionally made PFOA and bought it to DuPont, which used the chemical cousin of Scotchgard to maintain Teflon from clumping throughout manufacturing.
3M and DuPont have argued in courtroom and in public statements that neither chemical is dangerous to individuals at typical ranges of publicity. However two years earlier than 3M introduced its phaseout in 2000, the corporate knowledgeable EPA officers for the primary time that PFOA and PFOS accumulate in human blood, take years to go away the physique and don’t break down within the setting.
Data obtained by Bilott confirmed DuPont had decided in 1961 that PFOA is poisonous in animals. In 1970, an organization that bought 3M’s PFOS-based firefighting foam abruptly halted an indication after it killed fish in a close-by stream. Eight years later 3M paused one among its animal research after each monkey fed PFOS died.
DuPont decided that PFOA handed from pregnant workers to their fetuses. Two of seven infants born to Teflon plant workers in 1981 had facial deformities just like what 3M had present in new child rats.
Different testing by 3M discovered the compounds in apples, bread, inexperienced beans and floor beef. DuPont detected PFOA within the consuming water of communities close to the Teflon plant.
None of this data was shared with the general public. DuPont and 3M stored the U.S. EPA in the dead of night for years, firm and authorities data present.
Bilott additionally found that years earlier than he sued DuPont on behalf of the Tennants, firm scientists had examined the creek operating via the household’s pasture. It was contaminated with excessive ranges of PFOA.
DuPont and the household settled the lawsuit quickly after Bilott shared that data with one of many firm’s legal professionals, who had referred to PFOA in an electronic mail as “the fabric 3M sells us that we poop into the river and into consuming water.”
After the Tennants had been paid and Bilott’s legislation agency collected its charges for representing them, he discovered himself coming again many times to the piles of business paperwork he had collected, urged on by the persistent Tennant.
Bilott created a timeline that confirmed what DuPont and 3M knew concerning the chemical compounds. Then he wrote a 19-page letter, connected among the business paperwork and mailed the bundle to officers on the EPA and the Division of Justice.
“Throughout the course of the litigation, we now have confirmed that the chemical compounds and pollution launched into the setting by DuPont … could pose an imminent and substantial risk to well being and the setting,” Bilott wrote originally of his March 6, 2001, letter.
He sued DuPont once more on behalf of hundreds of people that lived close to the Teflon plant and for many years had been uncovered to PFOA via consuming water and air air pollution.
When DuPont settled that lawsuit in 2004, the corporate agreed to finance a examine of PFOA’s well being results. Practically 70,000 individuals participated.
The C8 Science Examine (named for DuPont’s inside code for PFOA) discovered a “possible hyperlink” between the chemical and sure illnesses in people, a few of which 3M and DuPont had present in animals years, if not a long time, earlier.
DuPont later paid greater than $750 million to settle lawsuits filed by Teflon plant neighbors with PFOA-linked illnesses, together with testicular and kidney most cancers, excessive ldl cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid illness and pregnancy-induced hypertension.
In Minnesota, 3M paid an $850 million settlement after the state’s lawyer common used the business paperwork in a lawsuit demanding clear consuming water for communities close to one among its manufacturing vegetation outdoors Minneapolis.
“But to this present day the businesses deny duty,” Bilott stated in an interview. “Within the meantime, individuals are consuming these chemical compounds every single day. Infants are born every single day with these chemical compounds. Seventy years later these chemical compounds are in our soil, our air, in wildlife. They’re nonetheless in all of us.”
PFOA and PFOS are amongst greater than 9,000 variations of artificial chemical compounds often called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS. About 600 are in use right now, in response to the EPA.
Alternate options for PFOA and PFOS — promoted as secure by business — are simply as harmful, if no more so, scientists are discovering. There are also associated substances referred to as precursors that rework into PFOA and PFOS within the physique or the setting.
“They’re all over the place. That’s what’s so scary about these chemical compounds,” stated Jamie DeWitt, a professor of pharmacology and toxicology at East Carolina College who research PFAS. “It begs the query: What number of cancers and different well being results are we keen to just accept?”
Bilott is again in courtroom once more. This time he’s in search of to drive 3M and DuPont to pay for medical monitoring of each American uncovered to PFAS.
In March, a federal choose restricted the case to Ohio residents with a certain quantity of the chemical compounds of their blood, which alone might embody as much as 11 million individuals.
The chemical corporations are interesting the choice.
Tennant didn’t reside to witness the scope of what unfolded after he persuaded Bilott to file the lawsuit about his lifeless cows. He died of a coronary heart assault in 2009 at age 67.
Story by Michael Hawthorne, Chicago Tribune.
