DuPont

This issues began when a West Virginian farmer, Tenant, contacted Bilott to help him discover whether a company called Dupont’s chemicals were causing his livestock to die, not knowing that Bilott was a corporate lawyer adept at defending such companies. In the 80s Tennant’s family sold some of their land to DuPont where they started a landfill. Tennant’s cows began to exhibit a host of medical issues, from discolorations, hair loss, behavioral changes, organ damage, deformations, and 153 of the cows died. Tennant speculated that this was a result of ingestion of chemicals from DuPont’s landfill. Bilott decided to take on the case despite his firm’s usual practice of defending corporations rather than plaintiffs.

The article describes Bilott’s background as not being a typical corporate lawyer since he was raised as a military brat, attended a small liberal arts college instead of an Ivy League school, and was progressively-inclined. At Taft Law firm, he honed his skills as an environmental law expert. In 1999, Bilott filed the lawsuit against Dupont and immediately corruption was apparent as vets from chosen by the EPA and DuPont conducted a study that found DuPont was not responsible, rather that the Tennants were at fault. As Billot continued to dig, it became more difficult to determine the cause of the cattle’s illnesses yet came across a term in an EPA report called, PFOA, that stumped him. It was short for perfluorooctanoic acid. Billot the requested more information about DuPont’s finding about PFOA and received boxes and boxes of papers about it through a court order. After deep digging through paper piles, he began to see a trend that PFOA had some hazardous effects and DuPont had known for a long time. In the 1950s DuPont bought recently invented PFOA to make Teflon, it was supposed to be disposed of through chemical waste treatment or incineration however, Dupont instead dumped PFOA into the Ohio River and it eventually entered the local water supply in West Virginia. There was evidence that it caused organ damage, tumors, cancer, harming factory workers and causing birth defects. They found that local drinking water contains three times the amount of PFOA considered safe. Yet DuPont did not report any of the findings to the EPA because of the dependence on PFOA for profit. By the 90s, DuPont was dumping the dangerous PFOA toxic waste to the landfill near the Tennant’s farm, knowing that this caused the water in the creek on the farm contained high levels of PFOA. Once again, DuPont did not disclose this information.

In 2000 after learning all of this, Tennant contacted DuPonts lawyers and received a settlement. Bilott continued to pursue DuPont due to their blatant corporate greed and disregard for public safety. Eventually he wrote an extensive public brief and sent it to the EPA. DuPont tried to prevent this from happening by sending a failed gag order, blatantly admitting that they knew they had done wrong. The entire case highlighted the dependence of the public on regulatory agencies to protect them from dangerous chemicals, yet a 1976 law only allows the EPA to ban chemicals when it has evidence which companies are reluctant to provide. Eventually DuPont made a 16.5 million dollar settlement with the EPA, which only represented a small percent of the revenue DuPont had coming in based on PFOA. There was then a class action suit against DuPont in which many people affected by the chemical such a factory workers, scientists, researcher, local citizens came forward. However, it was hard to challenge the EPA, if PFOA was not labelled as a toxin, eventually the West Virginia EPA decided the toxic level in water was 150 parts per billion, while Bilott’s team had deemed 0.2 ppb as toxic. The law became victim focused, so if a they were exposed to a toxin they are able to sue retroactively. The DuPont panel was appointed to investigate the blood samples of many West Virginia residents to determine whether they would pay for the law mandated reparations, yet this process took years.

The pressure of this drawn out case stressed Bilott a great deal, he had intense physiological stress symptoms. In 2011, the panel finally identified that there was a link between PFOA and cancer among other diseases, then the plaintiffs were able to filed their lawsuits against DuPont.

The whole case highlights the need for regulation of toxic chemicals, transparency among manufacturing companies and saddens me to know that how widespread these chemicals have reached. So many lives have been impacted by this corporate greed, failure to accept consequences, and the lack of oversight from regulatory agencies. It makes me wonder if I’ve been exposed to anything, better yet, WHAT I’ve been exposed to. In the future, I will avoid using Teflon cookware due to my awareness of the harmful impacts that PFOA has had on thousands of people during the DuPont case.